Bungee Connect Developer Network

We have gotten a lot of great coverage lately and I want to call out a few key pieces:

Bungee: The Software Life Cycle as a Service - Robin Bloor, Hurwitz and Associates

Nowadays development environments are like amoebas, they all look alike to me and they all seem to work in a similar fashion, but BungeeConnect is startlingly different in several ways.

How PaaS pulls software pricing down - Phil Wainewright, ZDNet

The pricing is interesting because Bungee has done away with separate pricing for storage, bandwidth, processing and so on, instead setting a single fixed price of $0.06 (six US cents) per user-session-hour.

Jumping from SaaS to PaaS - Lauren McKay Destination CRM

Picking up where software-as-a-service (SaaS) leaves off in terms of integration and interactivity is the relatively new platform-as-a-service (PaaS) model. Bungee Labs, a young PaaS vendor, aims to ease the process of integrating siloed CRM applications with other Web-based business solutions and third-party data.

Bungee Jumps into a federated platform model - Robert Mullins, SD Times

Bungee Labs, a platform-as-a-service provider, is offering two options for hosting applications created on its developer platform, in an effort to serve enterprises who want to keep their applications on their own network as well as those with their heads in cloud computing.

Bungee Jumps into federated hosting - Clint Boulton, eWeek

Startup Bungee Labs is taking the next step in what it believes is the first comprehensive platform-as-a-service offering with federated hosting for its Bungee Connect platform.

Bungee Labs Evolves Federated Hosting - Richard McManus, ReadWriteWeb

Federated hosting, low pricing and perhaps eventually open sourcing parts of the platform are good moves - but the bottom line is that those features need to attract new customers. It’ll be worth checking back on Bungee Labs again at next year’s Web 2.0 Expo!

Enterprise Software: Customer Survey 2008 - McKinsey & Company

The second archetype is the development platform, typified by companies such as Bungee Labs and Coghead. The innovation here is around providing all or some of the integrated developer environment (IDE) tools needed for creating an application on the Web, in addition to hosting. It is a cost-effective alternative to licensing on-premise toolkits for developers, i.e., SDKs. While this is the most nascent, and hence least understood, of the three archetypes, it could create a tectonic shift in software development by opening application creation to a much wider array of developers for a modest cost and even enabling a new generation of non-developers to create SaaS applications easily.

-Brad

The latest addition to Bungee Connect’s growing gallery of sample applications is the classic web app example: a basic storefront application:

This is a mid-sized app demonstrating how to connect to a MySQL database and how you can skin an app. For a more detailed description see the wiki article for the Storefront here.

You can import the app by expanding the Applications section as shown here. Click it and import.

Amy Ballard
Community Program Manager

Ted Haeger, Brad Hintze and Dave Mitchell will be back in San Francisco on May 28th and 29th for Google I/O. If you would meet up with us while we are there leave a comment below.

-Brad

Date: Wednesday May 14

Time: 2:00 - 3:00 pm MDT

Register for the event to attend

Have you finished the 3 Start Tab tutorial, or close finishing these? We would like to invite you to a new learning program for developers new to Bungee Connect.

Bungee Connect’s 101 “live” Webcast will focus on:

• Application building blocks: classes, fields, function, forms, etc.
• What does “model driven” mean and how it helps you build app in Bungee Connect
• Walk through of a small application
  • How is the model connected to the view: Model-View-Adapter model
  • How do the components interact
  • How inheritance can simplify your app
• A chance to ask any questions you have about the Start Tab, building apps in Bungee Connect or any other burning questions!

If you haven’t completed the 3 Start Tab tutorials, please spend some time checking them out before attending this webcast! We’re looking forward to getting to know you and discover what you want to do with Bungee Connect.

Amy Ballard, Community Program Manager

The monthly Jump Cast for Bungee Connect Developer Network is coming up on Tuesday, May 13 at 2:00 MDT.

The Jump Cast provides BCDN Developers with an opportunity to talk directly with the Bungee team, and ask questions about Bungee Connect.

Agenda for this Jump Call:

1. What’s Next? Product Manager Dave Brooksby tells what’s planned for the next update
2. Presentation: Tab control design patterns
3. Open Q&A

Register for the event to attend.

eBay Developers Conference

Brad Hintze and Ted Haeger will be at the eBay Developer Conference on June 16-18th in Chicago. We are leading a session on “Building your app, not shaving the yak”. Should be a fun discussion on how to remove the stuff that doesn’t add any value to the applications you are building.

We’ll post an update once the session time has been announced. If you would like to meet while we are out there please drop us a line at brad [at] bungeelabs [dot] com or ted [at] bungeelabs [dot] com.

–Brad

Today we announced support for PostgreSQL and Postgres Plus databases in Bungee-powered applications. This new capability represents another step toward providing developers with the most flexibility in managing, hosting and using their data in Bungee-powered applications.

Working with SQL-based databases inside of Bungee Connect is pretty straight forward. There are several tools to help you, such as:

• SQL Console - Work directly with the database during development using the database console. Simply type in your statement and see the returned results below. This is a very handy way to work with your database, including adding/removing tables or columns or test out statements from your application.
• Event Viewer - Through the event viewer you can see the statement sent to the database server and the results that were returned. During simulation the event viewer will log all the requests to the server and the responses, making it easy to debug your application and ensure it is doing exactly what you expected.
• Connection Config - Simply enter your credentials and you’re connected. Of course, you can switch between sandbox and production environments programmatically.

Just this week we have also released a developer sample application powered by MySQL. This article covers this storefront developer sample. Note: When you import the sample application a sandbox database will be automatically created for you, simply simulate and get started.

The documentation team has also been hard at work documenting the integration of SQL databases into Bungee-powered applications. You can find that documentation here. Though written for MySQL you can use it for PostgreSQL databases, the concepts are the same with a few slight differences.

Postgres has a schema layer within the database. Tables are within the schema. When querying a database table you need to include the schema in dotted notation before the table name. Where the MySQL query would be “select * from itemsTable” the Postgres query would be “select * from schemaName.itemsTable”.

MySQL uses the lastInsertID function to get the primary key for the most recent inserted row in a table. For Postgres, you need to query such as “select currval(‘schemaName.tableNameidColumnNameseq’)”. Where schemaName, tableName and idColumnName are replaced by the values of your schema, table and column name. This query can be executed using the queryOneResult function which will return the id of the last inserted row.

As always, we are interested in your feedback on this new capability and how Bungee Connect can better meet your needs.

-Brad

From using Bungee Builder both obsessively and incessantly, I have found a couple best practices for your browser.

1. Get rid of all your browser chrome. It just takes up valuable real estate that you want for Bungee Builder.
2. If you’re using a MacBook or MacBook Pro (as I am), never navigate to the builder from another page, or your delete key will act like a back button.

So here’s the handy trick I use so that I follow both of these guidelines: set up a Javascript bookmark as your launcher.

You do this by creating a bookmark that points to the following URL:

• javascript:window.open('http://builder.bungeeconnect.com', 'Bungee%20Connect','resizable=yes')

Here’s a quick screenshot from Firefox on my Linux desktop. (This should work close to the same in any of the big three browsers, but post a comment if you find it does not.)

May 4 & 5, 2008, Moscone South, San Franciso, CA

Brad Hintze and Ted Haeger will be at Startup Camp this coming Sunday and Monday. We intend to lead one or more discussions on how entrepreneurs can use hosted platforms (Platform as a Service) as a springboard for proving out their product/service ideas.

Sunday evening, we present on the main stage. Then, if there is interest, we may a lead hand-ons developer session as an unconference session.

If you’d like us to cover anything specific, or to participate in a session that you are leading, please drop us a comment and let us know.

–Ted

With more and more discussion occurring around the concept of Platform as a Service (PaaS), developers, IT and business managers are doing their fair share of head scratching, trying to understand the business value and benefits of a cloud-based approach to develop, test, deploy, host, and maintain online applications in a single, integrated in-the-cloud environment.

To aid this understanding, Bungee Labs has published and sponsored a free 14-page White Paper “The Next Evolution in Web Apps: Platform-as-a-Service” (PDF), written by Dion Hinchcliffe, a well-known business strategist and enterprise architect, who speaks, writes, and works prolifically hands-on with clients in the Fortune 500, federal government, and the Internet startup community. Dion has extensive hands on experience building and deploying large-scale, next generation Web applications, and helps lead the industry by evolving the thinking around Web 2.0 in the enterprise on ZDNet and Social Computing Magazine.

The Next Evolution in Web Apps: Platform-as-a-Service

- Executive Summary

Although the Web has evolved into the most efficient way in history for individuals and companies to access and share data, it doesn’t always live up to its true potential. For every Web-based application or Web site that delivers a rich, intuitive user experience, many more lack true interactivity and require multi-step, multi-page processes to complete simple business transactions. Those IT departments that can justify the expense invest tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars to patch together and manage many technologies using multiple languages in order to create a single online application — yet the results may only approach the ease of use and interactive experience consumers expect.

Instead of looking for ways to make inadequate technology work better, businesses can bypass these problems by moving the entire Web application lifecycle to an online unified development and deployment platform. This new approach, called Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), unlocks the Web’s full potential by using a Web-native platform to create and deliver applications in the same environment in which they’re meant to be used.

Bungee Connect from Bungee Labs is a comprehensive PaaS offering businesses the ability to leverage the power and ubiquity of the Web to develop, test, deploy, host, and maintain online applications in a single, integrated environment. The Bungee Connect PaaS accelerates development, improves access to data, enhances collaboration, eliminates provisioning and management of infrastructure, and allows developers to focus on creating a higher level of functionality, without compromising control over data. The result: richer, more intuitive applications that reach more end users, for a significantly higher return on investment (ROI) and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

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Download the full PDF White Paper (no registration required): - The Next Evolution in Web Apps: Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

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Alex Barnett, VP Community