It seems that EZOfferings (EZO) is the next big thing from Sun as it makes installation of a demo or development system a snap. One has to pop in the DVD, install Solaris, answer around three to ten easy questions and then it automatically deploys a Comms, Identity or Web Suite on one to four systems in about forty minutes.

One should note where first Solaris(10) is installed. It is pertinent as it implies the software has a well known and tested environment with all the revelant patches so it seems that everything might just work fine.
EZOffering has three parts:

• The first part is a wizard which asks for the domain name, host names, password etc. The code is derived from the wizard project.
• Next part is a set of perl scripts and they start with the information provided by the wizard and generate a master property file which describes exactly how the application suite is to be deployed and adds various path names and interweaving the various products to all work seamlessly together.
• The last thing is an internal project, the HiveMind Framework which handles the distributed deployment.

It had been reported that EZO had problems but these were with a pre release version of the Comms EZO which has been distributed widely. Bill would be putting together an SDK for the various product groups in order to develop an EZO around their own products and his focus would be on developiong a more easily configured wizard which does not require custom Swing code.

Thnx Bill