Ajaxian

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Aptana Cloud: Develop on your desktop, sync out to the cloud

Category: JavaScript, Aptana, Cloud

Aptana have announced their cloud platform initiative, Aptana Cloud.

Aptana Cloud plugs right into your IDE to provide instant deployment, smart synchronization, and seamless migration as you scale. Aptana Cloud is ideal for developers who use scripting languages to create Ajax, Facebook, mySpace and all other sorts of Web applications.

The key is that this isn’t a infrastructure play, which they clearly point out:

Aptana Cloud is architected to complement Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon, Google, Joyent and others. To get started we’ve selected Joyent who serves up some of the largest of all Facebook apps.

This shows that their platform is designed to go meta, allowing you to deploy to various clouds in the future.

I think that the number one meme from Web 2.0 Expo last week was the “cloud”, coming off of the excitement of Google App Engine. With Aptana Cloud we will see sophisticated tools to make us productive in the cloud. I am very excited to see that it won’t be too long until developers will be able to build an application, hit DEPLOY, and be done. This is a huge win.

For developers:

• IDE plug-in integrates Cloud development, deployment and management life-cycles right into Aptana Studio in either its standalone or Eclipse based editions
• Instant deployment of projects to Cloud
• One click sync your project to the Cloud, or provide fine grained sync control too
• Integrated service management consoles
• Configure desired memory size and disk size
• Develop and instantly preview remote files right inside your Studio desktop environment
• Subversion source control.

As Ajax developers, the vision of Jaxer in the cloud is very interesting too. The entire application using JavaScript, and deployed up into the cloud, all through the nice IDE.

I was also pleased to read that not only Ruby on Rails, but Python is on the docket. After developing Django applications and playing with Google App Engine, I would love to be able to use Studio for Python code too. Not that Emacs (X or GNU) isn’t great, Steve!

Darryl Taft wrote:

Aptana adds extra value via IDE integration, deployment automation and active monitoring and notification services, Hakman said. “It’s like the ease and simplicity between iTunes on your desktop and its connectivity to services on the Web,” he said.

For developers, the IDE plug-in integrates cloud development, deployment and management lifecycles right into Aptana Studio in either its standalone or Eclipse-based editions, Hakman said. “The ability to deploy stuff to the cloud from Eclipse is part of this as well.”

Other developer features include instant deployment of projects to the cloud; one click can sync your project to the cloud or provide fine-grained sync control; the technology features integrated cloud services management, enables users to provision their cloud right from Aptana Studio, configure desired memory size and disk size, develop and instantly preview remote files right inside the Studio desktop environment, and includes Subversion Source Control.

Can’t wait go get an invite. If you want one too, request an account.

Also, Aptana Studio just passed 1,5 million downloads. Impressive.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 2:41 pm
5 Comments

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

What does Google App Engine mean for Ajax developers?

Category: Google, Cloud

I have been really looking forward to seeing the Google App Engine launch, and get in the hands of developers. This is just a preview release, and I obviously would like to see more languages and frameworks above and beyond Python and what we have now. The non-Pythonistas will all be saying “what about [insert my language and framework]”. Slowly, slowly, catchy, monkey.

What is the Google App Engine?

Google App Engine lets you run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. App Engine applications are easy to build, easy to maintain, and easy to scale as your traffic and data storage needs grow. With App Engine, there are no servers to maintain: You just upload your application, and it’s ready to serve your users.

You can serve your app using a free domain name on the appspot.com domain, or use Google Apps to serve it from your own domain. You can share your application with the world, or limit access to members of your organization.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. Sign up for a free account, and you can develop and publish your application for the world to see, at no charge and with no obligation. A free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.

During the preview release of Google App Engine, only free accounts are available. In the near future, you will be able to purchase additional computing resources.

You have to understand the limitations, and the model that is being used. In my mind this is very different than other solutions like EC2/S3. There are very different use cases at work choosing between a low level (and hence very flexible!) provisioning system like EC2, and a deployment solution that gives you a sandbox to deploy applications. Google App Engine is a full stack.

The stack gives you access to Bigtable, which also means that you are not in the world of booting up MySQL. You do things “the Google way” and some people will like it, and some will not. That is fine!

What excites me about this, is that I often have a bunch of little applications that need a host. Sometimes it can be a pain to setup. Other times you would like to make the service public but don’t want people to go hog wild and give you bandwidth costs and contention for your other apps on your host. Now I have a simple place to put these little apps, and this is where Ajax comes in.

As we develop richer applications with more client side logic, and natural service separations, we can create these modules as Google App Engine apps that do one thing well. There will be a natural fit for applications built with GWT, Flex, and other rich component toolkits.

Google App Engine doesn’t give you something that you couldn’t do in an Ajax application, but it does give you a place to throw up these services in short order. This is one step on the way to the world of DEPLOY. There are other services with different tradeoffs, such as Heroku.

I would love to see JavaScript on the server as an option, but that is back to language wars….

Posted by Dion Almaer at 8:55 am
7 Comments