The term Cloud Computing is used to refer to the whole infrastructure required to deploy and run Web applications on the Internet. The term is used to hide away all the complexity associated with the actual infrastructure, businesses simply have to worry about deploy their applications on the Cloud and pay for resources usage. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Aptana, etc… are all offering Cloud Computing service.
A few months ago I was excited by the idea when it was announced by Google, and applied to go on the Google app waiting list. Finally when I got an email to join I had a quick look and I lost interest as the service is based on Python and I don’t do Python I know Java quite well and I waited for a Java stack Cloud. Recently I stumbled upon a TechCrunch article about Stax, a new cloud computing service for Java.
Straight away I watched the screen-cast and applied for an account, the following day I got an invitation code and created my first application and database. I’ve selected to create an Struts application, and lucky enough it turned out to be a Struts 2.0 application. The service is only Beta, but looks very promising, the next step I’m going to try to create a fully fledged Struts2, Spring, Hibernate with JPA and Ext application and see how it all hangs together.
I can see the advantage of using such Cloud service for development and testing, but I’m not sure of the advantages of using it for a production environment. Obviously many factors will need to be taken into consideration such as cost, security, performance, etc… compared to to dedicated server hosting or any other solution.