Lots of choices: managed hosting, EC2, App Engine; also unfair Sun criticism of App Engine's Java restrictions

I use a (semi) managed hosting company (RimuHosting) for customer and my own work: so much more convenient than running a co-located server! If a raid disk fails, I don't have to deal with it. I am also finding Amazon's EC2 to be a very low hassle hosting option (although Elastic MapReduce has given me some grief today but that was my own fault - once I learned how to use it, Elastic MapReduce is great). I have tried deploying one Java JSP-based web app to Google's Java version of App Engine - very straight forward and a fun experience.

One thing I read today that rubbed me the wrong way: Simon Phipps (Sun) was criticizing Google for restricting the JVM by not allowing some libraries. There are other issues like no threading and outgoing sockets that he did not mention. I totally understand why Google needs to protect their infrastructure by sand-boxing the Java runtime environment. (They had to do the same for Python.) Phipps must know this. Sun has announced recently their own "cloud platform" and it will be interesting to see if they restrict the Java runtime - if they don't I don't see how they can compete on price/performance. Can't live with Google's Java runtime restrictions? Then, use something more expensive :-)

Comments

  1. Adrian A.3:04 AM

    > I totally understand why Google needs to protect their infrastructure by sand-boxing the Java runtime environment.But Amazon does not?
    Ar all the other alternatives that run on Amazon or are similar to?
    How can they run without the so called "protection"?

    > Can't live with Google's Java runtime restrictions? Then, use something more expensive :-)The java hosting based on AWS I mentioned in a previous post: Stax, won't be more expensive (at least it was promised so :) ) - they also have something that does hibernation (manual and in future API based) to reduce costs even more.
    Not to mention MySQL instances - thus making migration away or to that type of "cloud" much easier than the "constrained" solution.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Adrian A.3:23 AM

    Not to mention MySQL instances - thus making migration away or to that type of "cloud" much easier than the "constrained" solution.Well, it just looks like MySQL isn't such a big advantage after all, since H2Database can now run:
    http://www.h2database.com/html/changelog.html
    on GAE/J, thus offering a "compatibility layer" to existing applications, that don't have to deal with big tab table and the like - just work as before.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Dad's work with Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller

Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller facilitated my Dad getting a professorship at UC Berkeley when I was 3 years old. Oppenheimer left Berkeley but Teller was a good friend of my father and I remember him being in our home. Three weeks ago, my wife and I were just leaving to see the new Oppenheimer movie when my Dad called. He mentioned that when I was in grade school he was invited to give a talk at Princeton. After his talk Oppenheimer talked with my Dad and invited him to have dinner at his house. My Dad said Oppenheimer was not well (I think he died of throat cancer soon afterwards) but his wife Kitty carried the conversation. My Dad, Ken Watson, passed away 10 days ago on August 18, 2023.
Read more

Ruby Sinatra web apps with background work threads

In Java-land, I have often used the pattern of writing a servlet with an init() method that starts up one or more background work threads. Then while my web application is handling HTTP requests the background threads can be doing work like fetching RSS feeds for display in the web app, perform periodic maintenance like flushing old data from a database, etc. This is a simple pattern that is robust and easy to implement with a few extra lines of Java code and an extra servlet definition in a web.xml file. In Ruby-land this pattern is even simpler to implement: require 'rubygems' require 'sinatra' $sum = 0 Thread.new do # trivial example work thread while true do sleep 0.12 $sum += 1 end end get '/' do "Testing background work thread: sum is #{$sum}" end While the main thread is waiting for HTTP requests the background thread can do any other work. This works fine with Ruby 1.8.7 or any 1.9.*, but I would run this in JRuby for a lon
Read more

Time and Attention Fragmentation in Our Digital Lives

  As humans we have evolved over a few million years to be both attentive and reactive to danger, live in social communities, and spend much of our time being in the present moment gathering and eating food and socializing. The behavior of rapidly changing short attention to content on social media, too many good short form things to watch on streaming video entertainment platforms, are all rewiring our brains in an unnatural and unhealthy way. I fight back, but in really simple ways that entail little ceremony: Almost every morning I spend 30 minutes scanning Hacker News (about 10 minutes), Apple News (about 5 minutes), and the remaining time on Twitter and Mastodon finding interesting new (mostly tech) things. I make notes in a temporary Apple Note: links of things I may want to research, try, or simply read that day. I like to get this all done at once, and then not feel like I need to interrupt my activities during the day to “catch up” on what is happening in the world. In a way,
Read more