OpenSolaris Bible

I took some time to look for the OpenSolaris Bible (OSB) in my local bookstore. I was wondering if it really contained anything that I could not already get online somewhere. I mostly looked over the chapter on Zones. Although I'm sure this information is online, the OSB is written in a manner I understand a great deal better.

Most of the information I've found online so far is apparently written for SysAdmins. Although I've been a SA in the past, I am a programmer through and through, and we think differently.

Since I really need to understand Zones to setup the environment I want on my laptop, I will be picking up the OSB soon (probably about 3 weeks when I get paid). (OSB on Amazon if you're interested)

Note: what I'm attempting to accomplish on my laptop is a separate Zone that I can run GlassFish, Apache, and MySQL on so I can run "Intranet" type apps separate from my development environment. Yes, I've found instructions for running GlassFish v2 in a seperate Zone, but I want GlassFish v3 (Prelude), which fails to install with those instructions.

Running a Glassfish environment in an OpenSolaris Zone

There's a post on running Glassfish in an OpenSolaris zone http://number9.hellooperator.net/articles/2007/03/29/glassfish-in-a-zone

I've used that as a starting point to accomplish the same thing, but not being an Unix administrator, I did not understand some things I think he took for granted, which if I were smarter in these things I probably would have understood. I attempted to follow his instructions and got to the point of installing Glassfish. He using v2 and I would rather use v3-prelude. Since v3 uses a graphically installer and I can't seem to run any xclients out of a zone (even with ssh -X), I was forced to use the zip file from the downloads page. Now, however, I cannot access any updates or install any plugins.

Also, I'd like to have MySql installed in this same zone, but that does not seem to be available, even though it is in the Global zone. Now I have to decide if I want to reinstall it in the Global zone or install it to the new zone or point a jndi or jdbc connect back to the real machine.

What I'm trying to to: I need an application to track fighters for my local SCA group. Yes I can do that in a spreadsheet as the previous person that was in charge of this did. However, I'm a Java programmer and can use this to get some experience in Glassfish and Grails programing. I also want to be able to write and install other java/grails apps for home use.

Since I'll be using the same machine for development, I'd like to get the "production" version on another machine, at least virtually. A Zone will allow me to put it on a different IP. With the App Server and the Database in the "production" zone, I can test on port 8080 and the apache server on port 80 without clashes.