How good is FreeBSD as a development platform?

Question

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 s

Answer 1

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