The press release came out this morning announcing the Java Edition of the Morph Application Platform. You can see the official release here or attached below. If you are at JavaONE in San Francisco, stop by to see a demonstration of the Java Edition of the Morph Application Platform at the Webtide Kiosk located at 1224-4 in the JavaOne Pavilion or by visiting our Java site.
The Java Edition of the Morph Application Platform is currently in a limited Developer Preview at this time. Sign-up today to receive your invitation before they are all gone!
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New On-Demand Platform as a Service to Enable Java and Ajax Over the Cloud
- Morph Labs and Webtide join forces to create Java edition of Morph Application Platform and meet market demand for portable Java applications without vendor lock-in
JavaOne Conference 2008
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Morph Labs and Webtide today announced the launch of a new platform version to enable developers to deploy, deliver and manage Java applications without the time and expense of setting up and managing a web delivery environment.
The Morph Application Platform for Java, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that virtualizes the application environment and leverages cloud computing resources such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is now in limited developer preview.
Webtide, the team behind Jetty, has brought that Java web server to the Morph Application Platform. Through its developer advice and support, Webtide has played a key role in the implementation of Java into the Morph Application Platform to extend the functionality to include deploying and delivering Java applications.
Based on open standards and best of breed open source technology, the Morph Application Platform provides developers with an end to end web application environment that includes load balancing, high availability infrastructure, distributed computing, virtualized web stacks, databases, managed backups and 24x7 monitoring. It puts developers in control and provides an alternative to building and maintaining an infrastructure, or the need to invest in costly hardware. It also provides scalable resources and an environment that can grow or shrink as required through the push of a button, allowing Java developers to support customers yet avoid over-provisioning.
?The Java market is clamoring for a solution that matches our Ruby on Rails Platform as a Service,? said David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs. ?By adding Java support to the Morph Application Platform we are ahead of Google?s App Engine, which only lets developers write web applications in Python with caveats. We know that great software requires open, standards based environments and that is exactly what we are delivering.?
As the experts behind Jetty, Webtide will work with Morph and extend its developer advice, support and development to companies wanting to migrate or develop new applications that can run on the Morph Application Platform for Java. Webtide will offer conversion packages and expert support subscriptions, such as the ones it offers for distributions of Jetty to auction houses, banks, and online services such as Zimbra?s Collaboration Suite and Desktop, among others.
?Teaming up with Morph Labs provides us with a new way to extend our expertise and offer a comprehensive set of services for the on-demand world? says Adam Lieber, CEO Webtide. ?Our team can help migrate existing Java applications to the Morph Application Platform and provide ongoing advice to ensure the maximum benefit to the customer in terms of most rapid development and best practices in architecture.?
Demonstrations and more information on the Morph Application Platform can be seen at the Webtide Kiosk located at 1224-4 in the JavaOne Pavilion or by visiting the company web site at www.mor.ph/java
About Morph Labs
Morph Labs is the leading enabler of Software as a Service (SaaS) that virtualizes the application environment through the use of open source technologies to simplify the deployment, delivery, and management of web based applications.
Morph Labs uses virtual infrastructures including Amazon Web Services to provide a truly elastic environment for web applications that can be instantly provisioned and seamlessly scaled.
Morph Labs is a global company with headquarters in Cebu City, Philippines with additional in-country operations in Manila along with Los Angeles, California and Austin, Texas in the U.S.A.
www.mor.ph
About Webtide
Webtide is a global company that specializes in supporting and serving scalable Web 2.0 applications using Java, Ajax, and Comet. The company is the lead developer of the open source Jetty:// Java web server and Hightide, a comprehensive toolset for the development of scalable web 2.0 applications..
Webtide engineers are core developers or contributors to Dojo Cometd, Apache Geronimo, Glassfish, Maven, ActiveMQ, Cargo, Agila, ServiceMix, Jetspeed, WADI, and a host of other open source projects. Webtide offers its worldwide clientele development and production support, development, and training. More information on Webtide products and services is available at www.webtide.com
Showing posts with label platform-as-a-service. Show all posts
Showing posts with label platform-as-a-service. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Morph, Ruby on Rails, and Amazon Web Services
The Morph Application Platform, the first Platform-as-a-Service for Ruby on Rails, leverages Amazon Web Services for the deployment and delivery of Ruby on Rails applications. The technology behind the Morph Application Platform allows us to provide developers with an elastically scalable platform to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications to while keeping expense to a minimum. While the concept of a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is something we've covered before, the latter part about Amazon often brings up a lot of questions.
Where the confusion often occurs has to do with how the Morph Application Platform interacts with Amazon Web Services and more specifically, how developers deploying to the MAP must interact with AWS. To be perfectly frank, we specifically reference Amazon because it is a well-known brand that people recognize. From a developer standpoint, however, you could deploy to the Morph Application Platform and never know that Amazon was even in the mix..
Essentially, in the truest sense of the Platform-as-a-Service philosophy, the Morph Application Platform abstracts the underlying architecture; in this case the Amazon EC2 architecture. Think of the Morph Application Platform as a "Virtualized Application Environment" where our abstraction layer is the next generation of virtualization at the infrastructure level. the MAP uses commodity software and intellectual property to build a completely seamless layer of services that product enterprise class deployment, delivery and management to applications.
What this means is that when you deploy your application to the Morph Application Platform, you do not have to make any changes to your application and you never actually work directly with EC2. In fact, you don't have to work with any of the Amazon Web Services, though you can certainly leverage S3 or SQS directly for centralized object storage and queuing respectively. The key here is that you do not have to interact with AWS if you don?t want to.
There are a number of reasons for this abstraction of the underlying technology. Other than keeping the details of what is happening under the hood away from the developer so they can focus on the core product, there is another big reason for this. Morph is not here to be a front-end for Amazon. Since we completely abstract the underlying infrastructure, we can add new grids as they come online and even spread your application across grids. We get to leverage multiple clouds for the redundancy benefits and the developer doesn't have to make any changes.
It seems a lot of the confusion about how Morph leverages EC2 or how you as a developer leveraging the Morph Application Platform works with EC2 is due to the plethora of projects, talks, and blog posts about using Ruby on Rails and EC2. Most of the articles out there talk about using Rails as a front end for deploying EC2 images, something that is completely different that running a RoR application on an EC2 instance. Here are some of the resources from around the web on using Ruby on Rails and EC2:
Libraries and Projects
Just to put this all into perspective, EC2 has historically (since its launch just a few years ago) been used when computing power is needed on-demand. It is relatively trivial to "spin-up" instances to handle asynchronous processing, but to leverage EC2 for scalable web applications is a very different proposition. Add to that redundancy, load-balancing, databases, filesystem issues, etc. and you can see the value of a PaaS such as Morph Application Platform that leverages AWS while abstracting the underlying difficulties from the developer is necessary.
There are commercial and open source projects that provide you with a pre-configured image to place on EC2 (Linux-based system with Ruby on Rails) to run your Rails applications on the ?cloud?. Unfortunately those are still not abstracted enough from EC2 for the average Ruby on Rails developer looking for a simple deployment environment. It is our MAP technology, the "Virtualized Application Environment", that is the abstraction layer that allows developers to focus on their core product and not worry about the underlying systems and to keep costs down far below what you would pay to deploy a dedicated EC2 instance just to host your small Rails application.
Where the confusion often occurs has to do with how the Morph Application Platform interacts with Amazon Web Services and more specifically, how developers deploying to the MAP must interact with AWS. To be perfectly frank, we specifically reference Amazon because it is a well-known brand that people recognize. From a developer standpoint, however, you could deploy to the Morph Application Platform and never know that Amazon was even in the mix..
Essentially, in the truest sense of the Platform-as-a-Service philosophy, the Morph Application Platform abstracts the underlying architecture; in this case the Amazon EC2 architecture. Think of the Morph Application Platform as a "Virtualized Application Environment" where our abstraction layer is the next generation of virtualization at the infrastructure level. the MAP uses commodity software and intellectual property to build a completely seamless layer of services that product enterprise class deployment, delivery and management to applications.
What this means is that when you deploy your application to the Morph Application Platform, you do not have to make any changes to your application and you never actually work directly with EC2. In fact, you don't have to work with any of the Amazon Web Services, though you can certainly leverage S3 or SQS directly for centralized object storage and queuing respectively. The key here is that you do not have to interact with AWS if you don?t want to.
There are a number of reasons for this abstraction of the underlying technology. Other than keeping the details of what is happening under the hood away from the developer so they can focus on the core product, there is another big reason for this. Morph is not here to be a front-end for Amazon. Since we completely abstract the underlying infrastructure, we can add new grids as they come online and even spread your application across grids. We get to leverage multiple clouds for the redundancy benefits and the developer doesn't have to make any changes.
It seems a lot of the confusion about how Morph leverages EC2 or how you as a developer leveraging the Morph Application Platform works with EC2 is due to the plethora of projects, talks, and blog posts about using Ruby on Rails and EC2. Most of the articles out there talk about using Rails as a front end for deploying EC2 images, something that is completely different that running a RoR application on an EC2 instance. Here are some of the resources from around the web on using Ruby on Rails and EC2:
Libraries and Projects
- http://amazon-ec2.rubyforge.org/
- http://ec2onrails.rubyforge.org/
- http://code.google.com/p/scalr/
- http://www.elasticrails.com/
- http://mtnwestrubyconf2008.confreaks.com/05younger.html
- http://www.slideshare.net/johnward/amazon-ec2-rails/
- http://thinedgeofthewedge.blogspot.com/2007/06/amazon-ec2-rails.html
- http://blog.marcchung.com/2008/02/ec2-at-phoenix.html
- http://railspikes.com/2007/4/5/rails-on-ec2
- http://pauldowman.com/projects/ruby-on-rails-ec2/
- http://www.rubyonrailscamp.com/AWS+Console
- http://niblets.wordpress.com/2007/02/12/capistrano-ec2-sitting-in-a-tree-k-i-s-s-i-n-g/
- http://www.igvita.com/2007/05/15/distributed-ruby-workers-on-ec2/
Just to put this all into perspective, EC2 has historically (since its launch just a few years ago) been used when computing power is needed on-demand. It is relatively trivial to "spin-up" instances to handle asynchronous processing, but to leverage EC2 for scalable web applications is a very different proposition. Add to that redundancy, load-balancing, databases, filesystem issues, etc. and you can see the value of a PaaS such as Morph Application Platform that leverages AWS while abstracting the underlying difficulties from the developer is necessary.
There are commercial and open source projects that provide you with a pre-configured image to place on EC2 (Linux-based system with Ruby on Rails) to run your Rails applications on the ?cloud?. Unfortunately those are still not abstracted enough from EC2 for the average Ruby on Rails developer looking for a simple deployment environment. It is our MAP technology, the "Virtualized Application Environment", that is the abstraction layer that allows developers to focus on their core product and not worry about the underlying systems and to keep costs down far below what you would pay to deploy a dedicated EC2 instance just to host your small Rails application.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Tracks now on Morph eXchange
We have added the open source "Get Things Done" application Tracks to the Morph eXchange! You can see the announcement on the official Tracks site here.
If you want to use the Tracks application, but do not want to setup your own copy, then this is for you. It is FREE to use the Tracks application and of course, it is FREE to sign-up for a Morph eXchange account.
If you don't have a Morph eXchange account, simply go to the site and follow the simple instructions to sign-up. if you have an account already, login to the Morph eXchange, select subscriptions and you will see Tracks listed. Click subscribe, and you can launch Tracks and enter your data.
Go try out Tracks today on the Morph eXchange and start getting things done!
If you want to use the Tracks application, but do not want to setup your own copy, then this is for you. It is FREE to use the Tracks application and of course, it is FREE to sign-up for a Morph eXchange account.
If you don't have a Morph eXchange account, simply go to the site and follow the simple instructions to sign-up. if you have an account already, login to the Morph eXchange, select subscriptions and you will see Tracks listed. Click subscribe, and you can launch Tracks and enter your data.
Go try out Tracks today on the Morph eXchange and start getting things done!
BarCamp Orlando
On a rainy day in Orlando, Morph presented to an enthusiastic crowd of hackers, technologists, and creative types at BarCamp Orlando. In typical BarCamp fashion we presented our product without a lot of commercial overtones, introducing the crowd first to the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) concept and then to the Morph Application Platform and Morph AppSpaces; the first true PaaS for Ruby on Rails applications. You can find slides from the event, not just ours but all of the presenters, along with links to blogs, pictures, and more on the BarCamp Orlando wiki.
Overall, BarCamp Orlando had a great vibe, was spread across great locations in the heart of Downtown Orlando, and was packed with great people with plenty of excitement for all-things technology. There is definitely a strong Ruby crowd in Orlando, and our sponsorship of the
latest Rails Envy podcast leading into the event helped get people excited about Morph. If you haven't attended a BarCamp, and you are at all interested in the latest technology, find your local event and go.
Just a note to Gregg and his crew. You did a great job with BarCamp Orlando and we are happy to have been a part of it. Thanks!
Overall, BarCamp Orlando had a great vibe, was spread across great locations in the heart of Downtown Orlando, and was packed with great people with plenty of excitement for all-things technology. There is definitely a strong Ruby crowd in Orlando, and our sponsorship of the
latest Rails Envy podcast leading into the event helped get people excited about Morph. If you haven't attended a BarCamp, and you are at all interested in the latest technology, find your local event and go.
Just a note to Gregg and his crew. You did a great job with BarCamp Orlando and we are happy to have been a part of it. Thanks!
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