Meet-a-Mor.ph-POSS-ees

It was a good week for the POSS event notwithstanding the typhoon that threatened to wash all he preparations down the drain. You cannot be there and not see us at all. Mor.ph was there at the event the whole time: at the exhibit booths, plenary sessions and the breakout sessions - which for most of the attendees provided the highlights of the event.

The session on Ruby on Rails punctuated by the SaaS and PaaS connection (courtesy of Morph Labs' CEO David A.) was packed with nary a pair of ears not tuned-in to the value of the celebrated programming language and the promise of the new deployment model.

Indeed, Open Source and Mor.ph - do make a great match.

For event rundowns, you may click here.

Spike Stop

What is the one thing that irks web app users more often than forgotten passwords? Deteriorating response times. I used to often hear that some Facebook users had stopped adding and sharing apps when they began experiencing significantly lower response times. Twitter shared the same difficulty at several points in time.

Ultimately, this relates to an application's scalability. Scalability relates to the "ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged."

Scalability is an indispensable characteristic for web applications. Web applications that kickoff as a single application running on a server (or a combination of server/web server) and supported by a second application server (in the case the first application server fails) might potentially fail to serve increasing inbound requests. Web applications (or websites) that receive a fair amount of traffic do not have to contend with being able to scale, but is this the perpetual scenario?

As a web application developer, have you thought about your web applications' scalability? Todd Hoff shares some lessons learned. At Morph Labs, we encourage you to show off your Rails and/or Java application by running it on our end-to-end managed hosting platform. If your product hits a spike, we can help you scale. You wouldn't want your web app to simply stop running.

Spike Stop

Wikipedia describes scalability as "a desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged."

In reality, most web apps kickoff as a single application running on an appserver or appserver/webserver combination and potentially communicating with a database. Many if not all of the functions are likely to exist within a monolithic application code base making use of the same physical and virtual resources of the system upon which the functions operate: memory, cpu, disk, network interfaces, etc. Potentially the engineers have the forethought to make the system highly available by positioning a second application server in the mix to be used in the event that the first application server fails.

This monolithic design will likely work fine for many sites that receive low levels of traffic. However, if the product is very successful and receives wide and fast adoption user perceived response times are likely to significantly degrade to the point that the product is almost entirely unusable. At some point, the system will likely even fail under the load as the inbound request rate is significantly greater than the processing power of the system and the resulting departure rate of responses to requests.

A great engineering team will think about how to scale their platform well in advance of such a catastrophic failure.

Morph-spottin'

There's a great chance that you will find Morph presence online such as news and articles especially on the SaaS and PaaS front but it doesn't mean you cannot see and meet us in person. And we have the pictures to prove we exist.

RailsConf 2008 in Portland

Joomla! Day Philippines (ok, not us but you bet it's me who took this picture of Johan Jannsens, Joomla Core Team Developer :)

Oh, and if you will be somewhere in Asia this coming week, you can check us out to at the Philippine Open Source Summit.

See you there.

Call Us Disruptive, Too.

Courtesy of free-online-private-pilot-ground-school.com

Disruption does precede innovation most of the time but what if both run side-by-side? Then, better believe that IT will see the most profound changes in the next few years according to Gartner.

"Gartner defines a disruptive technology as one that causes major change in ?the accepted way of doing things?, including business models, processes, revenue streams, industry dynamics and consumer behaviour."

With so much change occurring in the industry what are the most important trends to watch?

The technology and business foundations for a second Internet revolution are in place. Many enterprises are now looking beyond Web 2.0 at the concept of cloud computing to manage shared computing resources.

Read about Gartner's Top Ten Disruptive Technologies here. Then find out about Mor.ph and see where you can pencil us in that list.

Start-ups, open source and POSS

A good friend at Hyderabad sent this piece of news about the recent Open Source Entrepreneurship Forum that his organization had put up. It sounds really intriguing and I'm reminded of Thomas Friedman's words, "For most companies, the commercial future belongs to those who know how to make the richest chocolate sauce, the sweetest, lightest whipped cream, and the juiciest cherries to sit on top, or how to put them all together into a sundae."

If you have been following Morph, you'd know by now that we have built our solutions using open source technologies.

In fact, we have implemented a similar kind of gathering -- 'twas the boot camp called Morph Code. Morph Code spawned a lot of interest just as the Hyderabad meetup did. (Read up the blogs about Morph Code here.)

Seems like there are (really) endless possibilities when we speak of innovation today.

And speaking of open source, the upcoming Philippine Open Source Summit is happening on June 23-24 at Morphlabs' hometown Cebu. We hope to see you there.

Morph AppSpace subscriptions for Java now available

Calling all Java developers! Morph AppSpace for Java is now here. Sign up and deploy your Java web application on a Morph AppSpace today.

This fully managed hosting environment supports Grails too.

And oh, don't forget to sign up for our Developer News Wire. We've got tons (well, lots) of exciting stuff coming soon -- and wouldn't you want to be the first to know about them?