Thread: Developer Appliance

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 in¬stall 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 .NETprojects withoutre¬qui ring either Windows, .NET Frame¬work 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 theXSP ASP.NETruntime 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.conffile does reside in /etc/httpd/conf.d. You can now start creating ASP. NET 1.1 or 2.0 web apps on Linux. 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.NETWeb applica¬tions on PCQLinux as well.

Programming in PHP
PHP is an open source dynamic scripting language that is very popular in creating we bsites. 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 run¬ning 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: Save the file into /var/www/html as "test. php". Now open Firefox and browse over to.

You should see a full PHP page displaying a number of system values. You can now start creating/using PHP application 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 Program¬mingmenu. 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 applica¬tion 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 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.