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Developer Appliance
Work with the top development platforms such as ASP.NET, PHP & Java under one roof in this appliance
Vinod Unny
Saturday, March 01, 2008
If you are a developer, you will be pleased to know that the PCQLinux 2008
Developer appliance packs a punch and more. You can program in the top three
programming languages/platforms in the world without requiring to install
anything new – PHP, Java and .NET.
Programming in .NET
PCQLinux 2008 allows you to work with the very popular .NET platform without
even installing Windows! With this ability, you can code for .NET projects
without requiring either Windows, .NET Framework or Visual Studio. Mono is the
application in PCQLinux that allows you to do this easily.
You can create ASP.NET 1.1 or 2.0 web applications quickly. But first you
must install the XSP ASP.NET runtime engine by issuing the following command:
yum install xsp. This will download and install a
tiny runtime engine for ASP.NET. Once installed, open up /etc/httpd/ conf/httpd.conf
and look for either of the following lines:
Include /etc/httpd/conf.d/mono.conf
Include /etc/httpd/conf.d/*.conf
If either of these two lines exist, check whether the mono.conf file does
reside in /etc/httpd/conf.d. You can now start
creating ASP. NET 1.1 or 2.0 web apps on Linux.
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| ASP.NET page running on Mono/XSP
on Apache under PCQLinux 2008 |
As a start, simply copy the directory /usr/lib/xsp/test
to /var/www/html.
Run apache using the command: service httpd start.
Once the server is started, open up Firefox and browse to http://localhost/test.
You will be greeted with a new screen that lists a large number of samples that
you can click on to view the results of in the browser. Each of these samples is
an ASP.NET Web form that runs on both Windows (using .NET) or Linux (using Mono/XSP).
You can now start creating your ASP.NET Web applications on PCQLinux as well.
Programming in PHP
PHP is an open source dynamic scripting language that is very popular in
creating websites. There are many PHP based web applications that you can
download for free from the Internet. PCQLinux 2008 Developer Appliance comes
with the core installation of PHP pre-installed. You do not need to install
anything new for running normal applications. However, PHP does have a number of
optional modules that you can download and install as well.
To test whether your PHP installation is up and running, make sure that the
web server is started using the command given in the previous section. Now open
a text editor and type in the following exactly:
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| A sample PHP page running on
PCQLinux 2008 |
phpinfo();
?>
Save the file into /var/www/html as “test.php”.
Now open Firefox and browse over to http://localhost/ test.php.
You should see a full PHP page displaying a number of system values. You can
now start creating/using PHP applications on this appliance.
Programming in Eclipse
If you are a Java developer, you will find that creating Java applications using
the Eclipse RAD tool will allow you to become productive much faster and you can
create your applications much more easily.
We have included this tool in the PCQLinux 2008 Developer appliance and you
can start it up from the Programming menu.
When you do start it up, you will be prompted for a workspace to use. You can
accept the defaults if you wish. Once the application starts up, you can choose
the kind of project (enterprise, mobile, device, framework, etc.) that you wish
to work on. The tool allows for all advanced coding features like autocomplete,
refactoring, debugging and more.
You can also download a huge number of plugins for this platform from
www.eclipse.org and participate in the Eclipse community at the same location.
The tool also comes with a large number of samples that you can install to help
you get started.
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| The Eclipse IDE allows you to
code, debug and manage resources of your project |
A simple Java application run
from within Eclipse |
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