Features for the Developer

For application developers, the Solaris operating environment includes a variety of toolkits and features to simplify the development of complex applications with graphical user interfaces.

• Multithreaded (MT) kernel. MT provides for a symmetric multiprocessing kernel where multiple processors can execute the kernel at the same time. Applications can be structured as several independent computations rather than as one thread of control. Independent computations execute more efficiently because the operating system handles the interleaving of the independent operations. This benefit of multithreading is known as application concurrency.

• STREAMS. STREAMS is a flexible framework for character input and output (I/O) that has been implemented throughout SVR4. It is easily customized for applications.

• Expanded fundamental types. ID data types (uid, pid, device IDs, and the like) and certain other data types are expanded to 32 bits. This improves the scalability of the operating system in large systems and for use in large organizations.

• Device driver interfaces. There are three types of interfaces for Solaris device drivers: device kernel interface (DKI), device driver interface (DDI), and the device driver interface/device kernel interface (DDI/DKI). DDI/DKI conformance means that device drivers have better source and binary compatibility across SPARC platforms so developers can write one driver to support a peripheral on all SPARC platforms.

• Automatic device driver loading. This makes drivers easier to install and devices easier to access.

• Device configuration library. The libdevinfo library, used to obtain device configuration information, has been made more robust and comprehensive in Solaris 7 software. For more information, see the man page libdevinfo(3).

• Dynamic linking. The Solaris application environment supports static and dynamic linking of libraries. The linker uses the version numbers of the libraries and executables to link applications with the proper libraries, routines, and interfaces.

• Operating environment. Supports a 32-bit application and operating environment for developing 64-bit applications and running a large number of existing 32-bit applications. Also supports a 64-bit application and operating environment for developing 64-bit applications, allowing new 64-bit applications to manipulate large address spaces and running a large number of existing 32-bit applications.

• WebNFS Software Development Kit. The WebNFS Software Development Kit (SDK) provides remote file access for Java applications using WebNFS. Since it implements the NFS protocol directly, it requires no NFS support on the host system.