Bungee Connect - Beta Opening Day
Last night the Bungee Labs team invited the first group of developers to Bungee Connect, officially opening up the early access beta program. The initial group of early access customers is small, but we intend to ramp up quickly as we carefully monitor the system for performance and scaling, adding groups of 50 until all registered beta developers get their invites (we currently have around two thousand early access sign-ups ready to get their invites).
The adjective "exciting" tends to be overused (I'm guilty of that), but it really was an "exciting" moment to send our first set of access invites last night and move on to the next phase of Bungee Connect's evolution. The pic below shows the moment we (Ted in fact) hit send on the first set of invites to our beta customers from Lyle's hotel room in Sunnyvale and doing so (as Ted says) with high fives and sighs of relief mixed with no small amount of anticipation in the hotel room and back at the ranch.
From left to right: Alex "me" Barnett, Ted "not-that-reverend" Haeger, Lyle "on-the-ball" Ball and Brad "we-need-hints" Hintze.
Now we've got Bungee Connect to this point, it's time to forge ahead with supporting the beta developers, responding to and collating feedback, work through the engineering and usability improvements, fixing bugs and known issues, and advance the user education content and experience so developers can get productive as quickly as possible. We have a lot of work ahead of us before we get to GA, but it's great to hit this milestone for the whole team - very energizing.
In the meantime, we've been encouraged by the interest and reactions of those who have been able to get sneak previews of Bungee Connect prior to the early access beta. Below are samples with links to some of the coverage we've received from tech media and bloggers.
Mike Gunderloy, Web Worker Daily:
"...I’m impressed with what I’ve seen here. It’s difficult to be 100% certain without having test-driven it myself, but based on unscripted demos, they appear to have nailed the IDE experience very well. And the set of capabilities and APIs they’re targeting are clearly core to many of today’s web applications. It looks to me like Bungee-based development will be a way to get from zero to “deployed” in record time, and that’s the sort of competitive advantage that developers need to keep an eye on."
Richard MacManus, Read/WriteWeb:
"As an industry analyst and someone keenly interested in where the Web is going, Bungee seems to me to auger a new breed of web app - i.e. highly connected apps that utilize a variety of external APIs and web services, from service providers like Google and Amazon. This will ultimately result in more choices for end users, and more innovation in web apps and online businesses."
Phil Butler, Profy"
"Perhaps the greatest innovation in services like Bungee rests in their potential ability to drive a more interconnected Web. Economically, large and small entities will benefit in the long run from a more flexible Web development system than that in place now. Bungee Connect is a very professional and well thought out application of technology and innovation."
Erik Dolecki
"The IDE is very sophisticated -- you should check this technology out."
Paul Robert, Infoworld:
"What Bungee offers is a professional quality, Web-based application development environment that combines development, testing, and deployment through a single, Web-browser-based interface. Developers can do layout and Web page design, create interactive Web applications with AJAX features such as drag-and-drop and right-mouse clicking without complex coding. Bungee Connect also allows developers to quickly integrate multiple Web services to create whole new applications."
Dick Wisinger, Formtek Blog
"It is unique in the on-demand developer environment that it provides. It doesn’t require developer setups on client machines. There are no web servers to set up, no libraries to install, patch and manage. The developer works through the browser and can deploy the application from the browser."
Ben Hoelting
"SAAS for the web developer. Who’d of thought"
Podcast interview with Ted Haeger at LinuxWorld, two video interviews, including a demo of Bungee Connect at PodTech and more coverage at Network World.
M. David Peterson, XML.com:
"Things are about to get interesting. Get ready."
Ryan Stewart, Adobe Systems
"...this thing is off the hook...Bungee Labs developed a web-based IDE that makes it really easy to hook into web services and build an application. The IDE is really, really cool and you can throw together an application pretty quickly and leverage power features like data binding."
Dana Gardner, ZDNET blogs
"The Bungee Labs approach has been a solution waiting to happen. All the ingredients are now in place. This will provide the means to create and test RIAs for many facets of businesses — large enterprises, SMBs, ISVs, other SaaS players, cottage-industry hacks-for-bucks. You name it. Bungee Labs is targeting this all at SMBs, but I see larger ultimate appeal."
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You can sign up for Bungee Connect early access beta through Bungee Labs site.