I know that lots of web hosting providers are offering FreeBSD, but how good is FreeBSD as a development platform?
Specifically, is Java 1.6 available in it? Is there somthing specific that it offers with regard to tools that is not available under Linux?
FreeBSD offers an excellent development environment. Compilers for C and C++ and an assembler come with the basic system, not to mention classic UNIX® tools such as sed and awk . If that is not enough, there are many more compilers and interpreters in the Ports collection.
FreeBSD offers advanced networking, performance, security and compatibility features today which are still missing in other operating systems, even some of the best commercial ones.
2. Who Uses FreeBSD? FreeBSD has been known for its web serving capabilities - sites that run on FreeBSD include Hacker News, Netcraft, NetEase, Netflix, Sina, Sony Japan, Rambler, Yahoo!, and Yandex.
The main reason why we prefer FreeBSD over Linux is performance. FreeBSD feels significantly faster and more responsive than the several major Linux distros (including Red Hat Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and Ubuntu) we've tested on the same hardware.
I've always found FreeBSD a wonderful secure hosting environment, but perhaps not the easiest development platform. You will have to dig a bit to get Java 1.6 up and running, though I think it will be doable. I hope you are familiar with emacs or vi. The ports system will afford you access to many pieces of software, but they will have to be compiled from source code. If you are familiar with standard Unix command line tools and the command line itself, you should have no problems with FreeBSD.
Alan
You can get binary distributions of Java from the FreeBSD Foundation, they signed an agreement with Sun for that. Art from Java, FreeBSD is awonderful development platform with every language and environement you may need/want. Disclaimer: I've been a FreeBSD developer for more than 13 years.
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