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At Yale, the production environments are all "server" configurations with no user interface except the command line. While some diehards believe that the original terminal interface is the best experience, most programmers today expect a graphical desktop environment and an IDE. Since the production systems don't have such things, the Sandbox cannot depend on whether you choose Gnome or KDE as your desktop, or Ubuntu, Fedora, or Centos as your Linux, and while Yale standardizes on Eclipse because it is adequate and free you can certainly try something else.You make a mistake if you do not use the same version of Java and JBoss that your application runs in production. Beyond that, there is flexibilityIf you have to add Gnome or KDE, and production doesn't depend on either, then the Sandbox concept doesn't care which desktop you use.
The production systems install JBoss using RPMs that are unavailable to us and in a scattered collection of directories specifically designed for starting processes at boot time and running them continuously and non-interactively. A development environment has to debug JBoss, which means it has to be installed where the JBoss Tools in Eclipse expect it to be and to start and stop under user control. However, once you are no longer wedded to installing things in system directories, then the development environment no longer really cares if the distribution is CentOS, Fedora, or Ubuntu.
So if you have a particular distribution you prefer, or you like to be leading edge, or you prefer a specific desktop (Gnome, KDE, ...), then the Sandbox can be configured the way you like it.
Thanks to Java, you can develop CAS on Windows, then run it on Linux without a problem. Therefore the choice of the OS is only an issue if the application requires a particular library or interface that isn't available on specific systems. GSSAPI, for example, behaves differently on Windows and Linux even though it is a standard Java API. If you are testing things that depend on the system like clustering and failover, then using Linux for that testing is the best policy.
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