5 ms·

AppJet now lets you host your own apps

36 points by bouncingsoul 18y ago

DenisM 18y ago
Anyone here uses appjet? Is it any good? How does it compare to google app engine? Thanks in advance.
- jhancock 18y ago
  It took me all of an hour to go through the entire online reference. It is clear and easy to understand. But its pretty barebones at the moment. What it lacks in extended features though, it seems to make up for in simplicity. so if a developer community can produce well written wrappers for existing Java libs there may be a future for it.
  - DenisM 18y ago
    What about storage? I'm worried about data integrity.
    - jhancock 18y ago
      The docs do not show any details on how their object storage engine works. The API is pretty simple. It isn't hard to provide a very robust storage engine that provides such an API. Their FAQ (I think) however does state that they have been running for about a year and have never lost any data; if that means anything ;). I would think that if appjet were to gain significant traction, you would need integration into other persistent options such as MySQL and Postgres. The easiest thing (I'm guessing) would be to just write simple js wrappers to an existing Java based ORM. Wow, I sure am answering a lot of questions about appjet considering I just discovered it a few hours ago!!!
      - olegp 18y ago
        Looking at the contents of the JAR, it appears that they use Apache Derby.
- railsjedi 18y ago
  Seems like a great thing to pitch to universities and schools. Can't see the use for general development. Hosting costs for your own slice is so low, and it gives you so much more freedom that a developer would have to be crazy to limit their options to only what appjet give them. Plus AppJet is still a small company so its not going to have the scalability of something like EC2 or Google AppEngine.
  - aaroniba 18y ago
    I actually agree with your assessment that AppJet seems limited as compared to renting your own server or part of a server, for general development. The original idea of AppJet was for it to be a place for simple 1-page apps -- apps where the effort required to set up hosting greatly exceeded the effort to code the app. A natural extension of this was to write a guide to teach people how to program. AppJet is still the only place I know of where you can learn to program and actually build an app that you can share with friends via a URL, all without downloading any software or configuring a development environment. Now we are working on addressing all the limitations of AppJet as compared to having your own server, and therefore make it a platform that you'd use for more "serious" apps, not just 1-pagers. Hopefully when we release the next version, you'll give us another look and decide we compare favorably to the alternatives for general development.
jhancock 18y ago
I really like AppJet. That is, I like its potential. Now that I can download and host my own, maybe the AppJet devs can open up the ability to extend AppJet. I could see quickly building appjet js libraries for RDB integration, payment gateways, HTML templates, full text search, etc... But to do it without reinventing the wheel, it would be nice to leverage existing Java code. Does anyone know if that is the direction things are likely to go?
- aaroniba 18y ago
  As the CEO of AppJet, I can tell you authoritatively that this is exactly the direction we are heading in.
  - jhancock 18y ago
    excellent!! Maybe things will be in play for my next webapp. I have been a believer in your approach to webapp dev for a while. I'm happy to see someone carrying the torch. Good luck to you.
DenisM 18y ago
I'm also worried they are not charging money. I wouldn't want to build an app there and have them go bankrupt after a month or two.
- henning 18y ago
  It seems like they could have a straightforward, profitable business model: for example, you would be able to get started for free, and once you start using more of their resources you start paying a reasonable monthly fee. the more you use, the more you pay. That way they could offer way more than 50 MB of space, and present themselves as a serious platform rather than as a toy for amateurs.
  - DenisM 18y ago
    50 Mb? I couldn't find any mention of this anywhere on their site. Is this per app or per invocation?
    - henning 18y ago
      I was going off of http://changelog.appjet.net/change?id=obj-Ly6j6D3po http://changelog.appjet.net/change?id=obj-Ly6j6D3po - it's per-app.
- aaroniba 18y ago
  The whole point of our releasing appjet-in-a-jar is that if we go bankrupt, you can still host your app yourself. We'll definitely charge money at some point, but right now we're focused on improving the platform for developers. Also, we have a spiffy virtualization engine for hosting apps that allows us to do it at negligible cost. So it costs us next to nothing to host our current load of 2,249 apps and ~3M combined monthly pageviews.

36 points by bouncingsoul 18y ago

DenisM 18y ago

Anyone here uses appjet? Is it any good? How does it compare to google app engine? Thanks in advance.

jhancock 18y ago
It took me all of an hour to go through the entire online reference. It is clear and easy to understand. But its pretty barebones at the moment. What it lacks in extended features though, it seems to make up for in simplicity. so if a developer community can produce well written wrappers for existing Java libs there may be a future for it.
- DenisM 18y ago
  What about storage? I'm worried about data integrity.
  - jhancock 18y ago
    The docs do not show any details on how their object storage engine works. The API is pretty simple. It isn't hard to provide a very robust storage engine that provides such an API. Their FAQ (I think) however does state that they have been running for about a year and have never lost any data; if that means anything ;). I would think that if appjet were to gain significant traction, you would need integration into other persistent options such as MySQL and Postgres. The easiest thing (I'm guessing) would be to just write simple js wrappers to an existing Java based ORM. Wow, I sure am answering a lot of questions about appjet considering I just discovered it a few hours ago!!!
    - olegp 18y ago
      Looking at the contents of the JAR, it appears that they use Apache Derby.
railsjedi 18y ago
Seems like a great thing to pitch to universities and schools. Can't see the use for general development. Hosting costs for your own slice is so low, and it gives you so much more freedom that a developer would have to be crazy to limit their options to only what appjet give them. Plus AppJet is still a small company so its not going to have the scalability of something like EC2 or Google AppEngine.
- aaroniba 18y ago
  I actually agree with your assessment that AppJet seems limited as compared to renting your own server or part of a server, for general development. The original idea of AppJet was for it to be a place for simple 1-page apps -- apps where the effort required to set up hosting greatly exceeded the effort to code the app. A natural extension of this was to write a guide to teach people how to program. AppJet is still the only place I know of where you can learn to program and actually build an app that you can share with friends via a URL, all without downloading any software or configuring a development environment. Now we are working on addressing all the limitations of AppJet as compared to having your own server, and therefore make it a platform that you'd use for more "serious" apps, not just 1-pagers. Hopefully when we release the next version, you'll give us another look and decide we compare favorably to the alternatives for general development.

jhancock 18y ago

I really like AppJet. That is, I like its potential. Now that I can download and host my own, maybe the AppJet devs can open up the ability to extend AppJet. I could see quickly building appjet js libraries for RDB integration, payment gateways, HTML templates, full text search, etc... But to do it without reinventing the wheel, it would be nice to leverage existing Java code. Does anyone know if that is the direction things are likely to go?

aaroniba 18y ago
As the CEO of AppJet, I can tell you authoritatively that this is exactly the direction we are heading in.
- jhancock 18y ago
  excellent!! Maybe things will be in play for my next webapp. I have been a believer in your approach to webapp dev for a while. I'm happy to see someone carrying the torch. Good luck to you.

DenisM 18y ago

I'm also worried they are not charging money. I wouldn't want to build an app there and have them go bankrupt after a month or two.

henning 18y ago
It seems like they could have a straightforward, profitable business model: for example, you would be able to get started for free, and once you start using more of their resources you start paying a reasonable monthly fee. the more you use, the more you pay. That way they could offer way more than 50 MB of space, and present themselves as a serious platform rather than as a toy for amateurs.
- DenisM 18y ago
  50 Mb? I couldn't find any mention of this anywhere on their site. Is this per app or per invocation?
  - henning 18y ago
    I was going off of http://changelog.appjet.net/change?id=obj-Ly6j6D3po http://changelog.appjet.net/change?id=obj-Ly6j6D3po - it's per-app.
aaroniba 18y ago
The whole point of our releasing appjet-in-a-jar is that if we go bankrupt, you can still host your app yourself. We'll definitely charge money at some point, but right now we're focused on improving the platform for developers. Also, we have a spiffy virtualization engine for hosting apps that allows us to do it at negligible cost. So it costs us next to nothing to host our current load of 2,249 apps and ~3M combined monthly pageviews.