First experiment with Cloud Foundry

I’m at a Cloud Foundry conference today. Cloud Foundry is an open source “cloud” platform as a service (PaaS).

I decided to dive in and try to deploy the server we developed at GiveCamp last week for the ‘Big Brothers and Big Sisters’ charity project. I started by mavenizing the project, so I had a war to deploy.

Then, I created a free Cloud Foundry account, installed their ‘vmc’ command line tool and ran the ‘vmc push’ command to deploy my way to the cloud. And it worked straight off! Don’t you just love it when tools just work?

Our webservice is now running on a remote server that can be accessed by the iPhone and Android apps the team is developing. We still have some database work to complete, but this feels like a nice step forward.

In the mean time, I am now officially a Cloud Foundry fan…

Tags: charity, cloud, cloudfoundry, givecamp

Central California GiveCamp Review

Had a great weekend at the Central California GiveCamp in Fresno this weekend. I joined the Big Brothers and Big Sisters team, working on a mobile app (Android & iPhone). I helped out on the server & database side where we created a Java WebService talking JSON, with a MySQL database. Most of the team were from Fresno State. Still some work do to deploying the solution to the cloud, but we made good progress.

It was a really enjoyable weekend, and all for a good cause. Thanks to Walt Read and Iran Rodrigues for setting up and running it all so smoothly, and Dr Alex Liu from Fresno State for organizing the team…

Tags: charity, givecamp