One of an emerging crowd of cloud-focused open-source application developers, The Cloud Tools project,has launched a commercial service called the Cloud Foundry. The open-source version of the project, whose tools are based on Amazon.com's 's Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud, develops tools to deploy, manage and test Java Enterprise Edition in cloud-computing environments.The open-source Cloud Tools
project, hosted on Google Code, is a prime example of the emerging trend of
open-source developers targeting the cloud and looking at services such as
Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine to host their applications.
An Evans Data survey recently emphasized this trend, showing that 40 percent
of surveyed developers
working on open-source projects plan to deliver their applications as Web
services offerings using cloud providers. The majority of respondents, at
28 percent, said they plan to use Google App Engine to develop cloud
applications, while 15 percent plan to use Amazon.com's Amazon Web Services.
Chris Richardson, founder of the Cloud Tools project, is one such developer.
Richardson started the Cloud Tools
effort more than a year ago and it has taken off, so much so that Richardson
has launched a commercial service based on Cloud Tools called Cloud Foundry.
Cloud Tools is a set of tools for deploying, managing and testing Java
EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud).
There are three main parts to Cloud Tools: AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) that
are configured to run Tomcat and work with EC2Deploy; EC2Deploy, the core
framework that manages EC2 instances, configures MySQL, Tomcat, Terracotta and
Apache, and deploys the application; and Maven and Grails plug-ins that use
EC2Deploy to deploy an application to EC2.
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