On 11 February 2012 10:51, Neil McEvoy <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hey folks > > I'm looking to create a 'How to create open data apps' guide kinda thing, > from a slant of the Cloud tools you might use. > > So the first thing I need to do is establish if this is even possible, and > who/how might it work. In short, can any one shed any light or experiences > of using tools like Google AppEngine, Force.com or any other 'Platform as a > Service' toolsets for creating open data apps? How do they do it at the > moment, is it mainly PHP web app type scripting?
I've only really looked at AppEngine but as far as I can tell these platforms take one of two approaches. AppEngine and similar provided a set of APIs for storage, data etc and run code in a sandboxed environment. At the time I looked into it you could only write applications in Java, and google provided a pretty decent set of support for the Eclipse IDE to help you do so. They might well have added other language support since. Other systems, AWS etc, expose something much closer to having a bare machine available, so the software stack is up to you. AWS requires you to code more defensively than you might on your own servers, applications are expected to cope with servers being shut down underneath them, volatile data stores etc. My overall impression is that it's relatively simple to deploy to these platforms if you're already familiar with the approach to design you have to have to write big distributed bits of software, and potentially full of traps otherwise! Bear in mind that I'm certainly not an expert, I'm only really replying because no-one else has :) I've written a lot of distributed systems code but none of it was deployed to these kinds of service platform. Cheers, Tom _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
