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Announcing Bungee Connect

At last, I can tell you more about what Bungee Labs has been up to...

We've just announced details about Bungee Connect, a 100% on-demand web development and deployment environment that will be going into Beta phase in May.

Over the next three days at the Web 2.0 Expo 2007 and on bungeeconnect.com we'll be providing a lot more detail on exactly what Bungee Connect is, how it works and why we think it will be a big deal when we go live.

So before I go on, let me quote a couple of people who have already seen Bungee Connect in action behind closed doors. The following are from tonight's two press releases (1 and 2)

First off, Dion Hinchcliffe:

“Ajax is just the beginning of the RIA story and Bungee Labs provides the rest of the solution with a web-based IDE, on-demand scalable deployment, a well-designed community model and a built-in component ecosystem with real-world licensing options,” said Dion Hinchcliffe, ZDNet blogger; President/CTO, Hinchcliffe & Co.; and editor in chief, AjaxWorld Magazine. “Bungee Connect is a surprisingly complete one-stop shop for the RIA development, deployment and operations lifecycle.”

Next, Dana Gardner:

“Given the current disjointed state of tools, testing and deployment models, most developers find creating rich internet applications (RIAs) to be complex, time-consuming and expensive,” said Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions. “By combining development, testing and deployment functions into an integrated, low-cost-of-entry service approach, Bungee Connect both broadens the numbers of developers that can produce web applications as well as slashes the barriers of entry for creating innovative ecommerce services and web-based businesses."

The Bungee Labs team has been working very closely with the Amazon team (and others API providers) the last few months to make sure Amazon's web services "just work" with Bungee Connect. Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist for Amazon's Web Services:

“Bungee Labs’ decision to make their development environment integrate seamlessly with Amazon Web Services is great news for our developer community,” said Jeff Barr, Senior Evangelist for Amazon Web Services. “AWS developers can now use Bungee Connect to directly access our services, which means they can build Web-Scale applications in an easy to use, browser-based development environment.”

Another provider of web APIs, Salesforce.com has also been working closely with the Bungee Labs engineers. This time a quote from Adam Gross, Vice President, Developer Marketing, Salesforce.com:

“Salesforce.com has demonstrated that the innovation and ideas of the consumer Internet are at the core of the next generation of business applications. Bungee Connect together with Salesforce.com’s Apex platform makes it easier for developers to create mashups for their businesses, and in doing so hastens the transition from traditional enterprise software to the new on-demand model of building and deploying applications.”

 So, what is Bungee Connect? Well, it's a lot of things:

  • Bungee Connect is a completely web-based integrated development environment (IDE) for building and deploying rich Ajax web applications, from simple web apps to seriously sophisticated Ajax applications. No install for developers, no installation of delivery infrastructure, and no client install for end users.
  • Bungee Connect is for developers, not for consumers. Yes, it provides a huge amount of automated support for the integration of SOAP and REST-based web services, Ajax app development and state management. You can develop sophisticated apps that integrate powerful (as well as simple) web services plus develop your own logic without having to write a line of code. It massivley reduces complexity. But, nonetheless, it is for developers, not consumers.
  • Bungee Connect provides a completely integrated means of deploying apps to the live web. No FTP. No separation between your dev, staging, production and live environment. No local set-up on your machine. No bits to install anywhere. No web servers, no app servers, no stacks, nor libraries to install, patch or manage. No 'Yak shaving'. It's all taken care of for you. You develop your app through the browser, then deploy your app through the browser and map the app to your domain / URL (or embed the app in your site) - It's your app. Oh, and you get IE, Firefox and Safari cross-browser compat taken care of too - you build your app once and it just works in these three browsers. Sweet.
  • Bungee Connect includes a whole code share and team collaboration concept. You can keep your code proprietary, or you can share it with other Bungee Connect developers in your workgroup or with the wider Bungee Connect developer community. There's a lot more to this than I can cover here and I'll be writing a lot more on this soon, but I like how Mat Asay described the community aspect as a 'Sourceforge for the 21st Century'.
  • Bungee Connect allows developers to leverage the world of web APIs. We've been working with the API engineering and evangelist teams at Amazon, Ebay, Google, Microsoft Windows Live, PayPal, RealNetworks, Salesforce.com and Yahoo! to ensure Bungee Connect works sweetly with the multitude of their rich APIs (both WS* and RESTful). The aim is to ensure Bungee Connect can work with any web service that you choose and by working with these teams and their APIs in developing Bungee Connect, we've got a great test-bed to make sure we can achieve this goal.
  • Bungee Connect is No Fee for the developer to use in developing and testing Bungee-powered apps. You only pay once you've deployed your app commercially or unrestricted.  We expect this to be US$1 per computer-network-interaction-hour, billed monthly. Again, more on this later.

And there's so much more. Tomorrow, anyone attending Web 2.0 Expo will be able to get hands on with Bungee Connect. We've got a booth with PCs (Windows, Macs and Linux) with the browser open (IE, Firefox and Safari) where you run through some tutorials and judge for yourself if you think we're all smoking crack (see pics below - no crack, just the booths). We'll also be updating the site with screencasts and plenty more details and Martin will be presenting and demo'ing with Brad on Wednesday morning. And by then I'm sure David might have something more to say too...

To underline a couple of points here: we're not live yet. We go into Beta in May and are looking for web developers who ideally already have experience in progamming against the APIs of the companies I mentioned earlier. So sign up if that sounds like you...

 

 

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Update:

Update 2 (4/18/07)

Comments

Rijk said:

"it just works in these three browsers"

There are more browsers out there... Especially the deployed product should be usable in all modern browsers. If you need contact with developers at Opera, I can put you in contact. You don't want to lose the Wii market of course :)

# April 16, 2007 2:18 AM

David Ing said:

Wow - that's actually a cool idea.

Go on then, was Bungee Connect written in Bungee Connect or not? ;-)

Also (this is rhetorical as I imagine you have to keep stum on details) is it more a Yahoo Pipes integration/mashup thing or do you get a full app language to code in? Just Jscript in the client, with just a lot of data-binders for state things on the server-side? What's the SLA? How about the isolation model between apps? Any relational datastores on the backend? Hot roll-out deployment? Data migration steps? User authenication provides? Are you going to do a 'Digg.com' user app example?

:-) Anyway - cool idea, good luck guys!

# April 16, 2007 7:11 AM

alexbarnett said:

Rijk - agreed - it's just a question of when. Thanks for the offer of putting us in touch with the Opera developers, we'll take you up on that.

David -

Re: "was Bungee Connect written in Bungee Connect or not?" ...ahh, self-referentialism - I love it too :-) Let's put it this way. You can build the Bungee Builder using Bungee Builder (that's the name of the dev environment inside Bungee Connect). It's crazy to watch it happen and hope to have a screencast showing this.

Re: "do you get a full app language to code in" - Yes. More details soon.

Re: "Just Jscript in the client, with just a lot of data-binders for state things on the server-side?" - Bungee Pulse is the coordination system a combination of a very thin client-side Ajax implementation, a comprehensive server-side sub-system within Bungee Grid runtime servers, and an intelligent interaction protocol that enables continuous application state management. Pulse optimizes both client interaction requests and server responses.

Re: "What's the SLA?" - Bungee Connect is designed for 24/7/365 availability as a top priority and business imperative. For now we'll be providing a "Beta" level service environment :-) So far, we have experienced very high availability of our services; >99%. Currently, Bungee Labs does not provide a specifically quantified Service Level Agreement.

Re: "How about the isolation model between apps?" - Yup, got that. More details soon.

Re: "Any relational datastores on the backend?" -  We provide the data store required to run apps. For filestorage and relational data (e.g. customer records, product information, transactions, etc), you can specify your own store as long as that data store is sitting on the cloud. More on this later.

Re: "Hot roll-out deployment?" - We've got a whole bunch of stuff to say on this, details to come. But byou should like it :-)

Re: "Data migration steps?" - Application data stored via Bungee Connect is and remains the property of the application publisher and you'll be able to get it out when you want.

Re: "User authenication provides?" - I think you mean "can the app provide authenticated access and different experiences to different users accroding to profiles / authorization?". Yes and Yes. Again, more details to come here.

Re: "Are you going to do a 'Digg.com' user app example?" -  We'll have lots of examples to show, some along the Diggg.com lines...

# April 16, 2007 8:05 AM

TrackBack said:

# April 16, 2007 8:06 AM

alexbarnett.net blog said:

Quick post following our first day at Web 2.0 Expo. Went very well I thought. The team got everything

# April 17, 2007 9:19 AM

BillyG said:

Congrats on your latest good fortune Alex!

(somehow I lost your feed on your last day in the rainy NW, but fortunately [for me] I'm back)

Sounds like sunny days ahead...

# April 18, 2007 2:37 PM

Alex Barnett blog said:

The "platform-as-a-service", or PaaS meme is getting more air play the last 24 hours as news of Google

# April 8, 2008 8:57 AM