Heroku co-founder James Lindenbaum is launching a new effort focused on giving developer-focused startups the tools they need to scale. He has recruited some significant peers and investors as advisers to teach member companies the ropes. Read more »
Google has announced a new service called Mobile Backend Starter that lets Android developers create and launch mobile apps on Google’s cloud with just a few clicks. Read more »
It’s not often the software world goes through a revolutionary change. But the advent of the cloud will force software developers to reevaluate – and discard – many of their most basic assumptions. Read more »
In his latest post on next-generation systems design, James Urquhart discusses the different types of PaaS offerings and why it matters that some are composable and others are contextual. Read more »
A startup called BitDeli is trying to democratize analytics by letting developers create custom metrics and dashboards using Python scripts instead of having to try Hadoop. What frameworks like Rails were to web development, Co-founder and CEO Ville Tuulos says, BitDeli is to analytics. Read more »
AWS CTO Werner Vogels and I sat down at the AWS re:Invent conference yesterday to talk about whether large companies are actually using the cloud to innovate through new styles of applications. Vogels says they are, and has plenty of examples to prove his point. Read more »
Writing Hadoop queries doesn’t have to be hard and neither does sharing data according to Mortar Data, which just released an open source framework for Hadoop applications. The idea is that groups of people can more easily collaborate on building apps around giant data sets. Read more »
Netflix has forged a cottage industry building tools to fill gaps in Amazon’s cloud infrastructure or otherwise add value to it. Now the company is open sourcing its Hystrix libraries, which manage interactions between the myriad distributed services that power its applications. Read more »
Mortar Data has raised $1.8 million for its cloud-based service that wraps Hadoop in a custom — and supposedly developer-friendly — blend of Pig and Python, meaning even novice Hadoop programmers can be writing jobs in about an hour. Read more »
HBase is a great option for developing big data applications, but it’s not necessarily easy to use. WibiData is addressing this by open sourcing a portion of its predictive analytics infrastructure that adds structure to data, followed eventually by a whole HBase development framework called Kiji. Read more »
Obama for America CTO Harper Reed had helped build Threadless, a site for selling hip t-shirts, but he had never done anything like this. Here’s how he and his team built a tech platform that might forever change how presidential campaigns are built. Read more »
MongoDB startup MongoLab has built a seemingly solid business delivering the popular NoSQL database via the Platform as a Service model. The trick, CEO Will Shulman says, is knowing how to sell to developers and understanding why someone would use MongoDB in the first place. Read more »
Former Yahoo cloud VP Todd Papaioannou and Facebook engineer Jonathan Gray are trying to big data for programmers with a new platform service called Continuuity. It’s a development environment and runtime layer that sits atop a company’s Hadoop infrastructure and abstracts the complexity of writing apps. Read more »
Heroku built an app that makes it easy for Mac users to download and get started using the PostreSQL database. Called Postgres.app, the product should be available in the App Store soon and includes a number of popular Postgres features and libraries. Read more »
The “Facebook generation,” as VMware CEO Paul Martiz called it in a presentation Tuesday morning, is post-PC and post-paper, and they want to experience information within the context in which they’re consuming it. And like it or not, they’re the future. Plan your IT accordingly. Read more »
According to former Heroku CEO and current Salesforce.com VP of Platforms Byron Sebastian, Heroku is hosting more than 1.5 million applications — an increase of approximately 15x in less than 18 months. It’s success is part of an industry trend toward PaaS acceptance for new apps. Read more »
If you have a lot of unstructured data, don’t have (or want) a Hadoop cluster and can write Python jobs, Mortar Data has got the service for you. The New York-based startup is jumping into the fray with possibly the most lightweight Hadoop service yet. Read more »
EMC’s acquisition of Pivotal Labs proves the company really understands the big data market. Namely, that big data won’t go anywhere without great applications, and EMC isn’t the company to help customers figure out how to build theirs. Read more »
When Microsoft and VMware latch onto a technology, you know it’s for real. VMware is now pushing a project called Spring Hadoop that lets developers use the popular Spring Java framework to write big data applications atop Apache Hadoop. Read more »
AppFog CEO Lucas Carlson isn’t shy about touting PaaS as the ideal way for developers to access cloud computing resources, but he also knows it’s not mainstream. In this inforgraphic illustrating the evolution of cloud computing, Carlson says PaaS will hit its stride in 2013. Read more »
Former Yahoo VP and chief cloud architect Todd Papaioannou is working on a stealth-mode startup called Continuuity, which aims to make it easier for developers to create data-focused cloud applications. The company has raised a $2.5 million seed round from Battery Ventures and Andreessen-Horowitz. Read more »
Never content with good enough when it comes to speed, Facebook has taken its open-source PHP-boosting HipHop technology to the next level for programmers. With the new HipHop Virtual Machine, Facebook claims it has improved upon HipHop interpreter performance by 60 percent. Read more »
Microsoft added fuel to speculations about its consumer-business prowess on Tuesday with the preview of its forthcoming Windows Store that will accompany Windows 8, but there’s a more fundamental issue facing Microsoft than whether consumers will buy Windows 8 devices. Will it have developers? Read more »
Google may be a giant in Internet search, but it’s still a 98-pound weakling in business-oriented application development tools. That doesn’t stop it from trying to bulk up: This week Google opened up its revamped BigQuery data analysis service to more users. Read more »
SpringSource, the application-platform arm of VMware, has been working closely with NoSQL startup Neo Technology to produce a version of the Neo4j graph database optimized for Spring environments. Additionally, SpringSource founder and GM Rod Johnson is now chairman of Neo’s board of directors. Read more »
Heroku is reporting it saw more than 33,800 Facebook applications launched on its service since the social network giant unveiled new features at yesterday’s f8 conference. On the official Heroku blog, Adam Seligman notes “that’s more than 20 a minute.” Read more »
Facebook and Heroku have completed an integration that gives Facebook developers direct access to Heroku’s cloud Platform-as-a-Service offering for hosting their applications. It’s likely just a first step for Heroku when it comes to integrating with popular specialized development platforms. Read more »
Google App Engine is growing up by changing both its service model and its pricing, and many developers who have been using the service under the old model are none too happy about it. Perhaps they should just be happy that App Engine is sticking around. Read more »
Mashape, an API marketplace catering to both application developers and providers, has raised a $1.5 million seed round from a who’s who of technology investors, including Index Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Ignition Partners, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Read more »
CloudSpokes, an Appirio-led community that hosts contests in which developers compete on projects for cloud companies with the goal of winning a monetary prize, recently re-architected the site from Microsoft Windows Azure to Database.com, and its team couldn’t be happier with the results. Read more »
Speaking to a jam-packed room of thousands, VMware CEO Paul Maritz kicked off today’s VMworld conference by declaring, once again, the advent of the cloud era. If you don’t believe him, just look at the number of virtual machines deployed. But cloud is more than virtualization. Read more »
Heroku, the popular Platform-as-a-Service offering initially for Ruby developers only, now supports Java. Actually, Heroku has added support for both the Node.js framework and the Clojure programming language over the past few months, but Java is in a whole other league. Read more »
Couchbase has big plans to take NoSQL mainstream. It unveiled two today: Couchbase 2.0, which combines the Membase Server key-value store with the CouchDB document database in a single product, and UnQL, an open query language designed to bring uniformity to the diverse NoSQL landscape. Read more »
Heroku might have expanded its embrace to include Node.js and Clojure, but its heart is still with Ruby. To wit, Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto is joining the company as its chief architect for Ruby, which should only improve its standing in the developer community. Read more »
Sometimes, the geeks come out of the shadows and hit the mainstream consciousness. Remember the early ’00s and the rush of publicity for Ruby and Ajax as they became the calling cards of Web 2.0? Node.js looks like the next candidate for such mainstream elevation. Read more »
PaaS pioneer Heroku has added support for the Clojure programming language to its offering. Heroku also supports Ruby and Node.js as development options. Supporting three development options might not appear like a big deal, but it is, especially for enterprise developers who require certain features. Read more »
Among the biggest problems with developing applications for the cloud is scaling the database layer. GenieDB, a competitor in our recent Structure 2011 LaunchPad competition, wants to give its customers the benefits of both SQL and NoSQL to scale across data centers. Read more »
CloudBees, the Java-focused Platform-as-a-Service company, is now offering a paid “Premium” version of its RUN@cloud PaaS offering. CloudBees, it appears, is trying to gain a foothold in the PaaS space while other Java-focused efforts are still getting underway. Read more »
Facebook today published an interesting visualization of just how complex its codebase is. Actually, the visualization is part of an application within the company, but it gets the point across: Making code changes is no small feat when every module is dependent on so many others. Read more »
German software vendor Software AG has bought Java-performance expert Terracotta with the goal of creating a cloud application platform to rival those from Software AG competitors such as Oracle, VMware and IBM. Terracotta has built a portfolio of open-source products over the past several years. Read more »
