By Caryl Takvorian, Staff Engineer, Oracle
We deal with hundreds of applications on a daily basis at Oracle® ISV Engineering. Most of them need to support multiple operating systems (OS) environments including Oracle Solaris. These applications are from all types of diverse industries – banking, communications, healthcare, gaming, and more. Each application varies in size from dozens to hundreds of millions of lines of code.
We understand the real value of standards, as we help Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) support Oracle Solaris. Oracle Solaris is UNIX certified and conforms to UNIX, an Open Group standard, providing assurance of stable interfaces and APIs. (NOTE: The UNIX standard is also inclusive of POSIX interface/API standard). ISVs and application developers leverage these stable interfaces/APIs to make it easier to port, maintain and support their applications. The stable interfaces and APIs also reduce the overhead costs for ISVs as well as for Oracle’s support of the ISVs – a win-win for all involved. ISVs can be confident that the UNIX operating system, the robust foundation below their application, won’t change from release to release.
Oracle Solaris is unique in which it goes the extra mile by providing a binary application guarantee since its 2.6 release. The Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee reflects the confidence in the compatibility of applications from one release of Oracle Solaris to the next and is designed to make re-qualification a thing of the past. If a binary application runs on a release of Oracle Solaris 2.6 or later, including their initial release and all updates, it will run on the later releases of Oracle Solaris, including their initial releases, and all updates, even if the application has not been recompiled for those latest releases. Binary compatibility between releases of Oracle Solaris helps protect your long-term investment in the development, training and maintenance of your applications.
It is important to note that the UNIX standard does not restrict the underlying implementation. This is key particularly because it allows Oracle Solaris engineers to innovate “under the hood”. Keeping the semantics and behavior of system calls intact, Oracle Solaris software engineers deliver the benefits of improved features, security performance, scalability, stability, etc. while not having a negative impact on application developers using Oracle Solaris. A sample list of applications supporting Oracle Solaris 11 can be found here.
Caryl Takvorian is a Principal Engineer in the Oracle ISV Engineering organization where he is the Solaris, Security and Telco lead. He has more than 20 years of experience with Solaris at Sun Microsystems, and now Oracle, helping ISVs adopt new technologies and develop software on Solaris. He joined SunSoft’s Developer Support organization in the UK in 1998 and from there moved to Market Development Engineering and now ISV Engineering at Oracle.
Caryl holds a French computer science engineering degree as well as an MSc in computer science from a US university. He lives near Southampton with his wife and his 4-year-old son.
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