Is Unix or Linux or OpenSolaris to use for studying Java & J2EE

[Ganapathy Subramanian G]

Hi,
I am new to the Forum. I have been using Windows Systems to run Java & J2EE .But now I want to learn running these in Open source stuff. I found many production environments to be running in unix or linux or solaris. I want to know which of these three would be helpful for a starter to learn all the configuration and programmatic stuffs in Java & J2EE.I do have some years of experience ,but need an guidance regarding to choose with best of breed OS to run java & j2ee stuff.
And Kindly do explain the Preference Reasons so that I could learn over it.

Thanks in Advacne.

[Jesper de Jong]

Welcome to JavaRanch. First, please check your private messages for an administrative matter from JavaRanch.

Yes, you can use Linux or OpenSolaris for Java EE development and a lot of people do.

I'd recommend Linux over OpenSolaris, because Linux has much better hardware support and a much greater community to help you than OpenSolaris.

You'll have to choose a Linux distribution. I'd go for Ubuntu (the most popular and easy to use) but there are also others such as Fedora or openSUSE. See DistroWatch for more info about the available Linux distributions.

[Tim Holloway]

Actually, I used to develop Java apps on a Windows desktop machine and then deploy them on Linux and Solaris production systems, thanks to Java's "Write Once/Run Anywhere" architecture.

The one thing that can be tricky about J2EE on Linux is that many Linux distros come with "gcj", which is an open-source attempt to replicate Java. Historically, it wasn't nearly complete enough to run production Java Swing or J2EE apps. Since Sun opened up a lot of the source code and the "Iced T" effort was made, a true open-source Java is more realistic, but I haven't yet heard that they're ready for Prime Time, so I install the Sun JDK's and use them instead.

[Pat Farrell]

Tim Holloway wrote:Actually, I used to develop Java apps on a Windows desktop machine and then deploy them on Linux and Solaris production systems, thanks to Java's "Write Once/Run Anywhere" architecture.

I remember being shocked and surprized when I just copies a .jar file over to a Unix machine and it worked, as all my development had been on Windows NT (this was last century).

Sun over sold a bit on the "write once run everywhere" but it really works if you avoid the OS specific stuff and the JNI.

Now, to answer the hidden question in the Original Post, I recommend Linux to learn. The question of which Linux comes up all the time, search for answers.