Nine Two Eleven

What can you accomplish in ten hours a week? What if you tried to find out? That is my plan. I want to see how long it takes me to launch a new web site working on it from 9:00 - 11:00pm five nights a week. Here is my expected schedule:

• 9 -5 work to pay the bills
• 5 - 9 enjoy my family
• 9 - 11 do something different

It is highly likely I won't actually work at doing something different as often as I plan but I need to start somewhere so that is what I'll start with.

I have been trying to come up with something to work on and so far the favorite idea is a fairly simple web site. Two items will be displayed and one can be voted for to determine the winner each day. The day's winner will be sent out via Twitter and can be viewed on the site. Simple.

Supply List

Data store to hold the items and the votes

Ability to track who voted

Scheduled process to calculate the winner

Some kind of broadcast

I will try and explain the decisions I make when selecting tools to use in the project. So far I am leaning toward being a SpringSource fanboy and developing a Grails application for Cloud Foundry using STS. Follow along and see if I change my mind.

Amazon EC2 Now 15% Lower Price

Effective November 1, 2009 United States prices for Linux/UNIX usage will drop from 10 cents an hour to 8.5 cents per hour. By my quick calculations this will drop the minimum monthly fee for a continuously available instance from around $72 to just over $61. Prices in Europe are also dropping. Get the pricing details.

Grails Hosting in the Cloud

How simple can hosting become? I’m not interested in a private cloud or putting servers in a public cloud, I want a cloud web site. To me the difference is with a server in the cloud you need to configure and manage the application server, while hosting an application in the cloud allows the provider to manage the application server for you. Ideally I’d like a solution like Heroku with their instant Ruby platform. What are the choices for completely managed Grails hosting today?

Morph Labs

Used by grailspodcast.com – The Groovy & Grails Podcast.
Morph Labs appears to be ready to manage everything except writing your application. With Exist thrown into the mix they may even do that for you too.

Google App Engine

Used by groovytweets ::: groovy in the twitter universe.
Google App Engine is from Google so I assume it will eventually dominate the Earth and any additional planets that tap into our Internet. Long denied Java love this solution grew from Google’s amazing amount of cheap servers and can now host Groovy and Grails.

Cloud Foundry

I don’t have an example site but Marcel’s excellent blog post provides detailed instructions on how to deploy a Grails application. There are a ton of comments wishing you didn’t need to bring your own fulltime Amazon EC2 instance with you as that sets the floor for pricing above most dedicated Virtual Private Server offerings.

Stax

This one came from a comment on Marcel’s blog and it looks promising. They web site claims to support Grails and it can scale down below a full EC2 instance as well as up to multi-server clusters. Being able to begin with less than a 24/7 server instance sounds appealing but may need further investigation.

Something Else

I’m certain that I must have missed something.  There are probably lots of other capable solutions because there seem to be new offerings every week. Of course they need to support Java. I looked at Rackspace and Joyent but they didn’t seem to cover the management and/or Java requirements. If you know of additional services for Grails hosting in the cloud please let me know in the comments. I’d like to develop a comprehensive list.

SpringSource Launches Enterprise Java Cloud

SpringSource Launches Enterprise Java Cloud

This is interesting. However, I am always a little nervous about a single vendor providing every part of a solution. I think that may not be justified, especially in this case. I've assumed for some time that any future Grails projects I do would be hosted in the cloud. There are multiple vendors doing a good job of supporting Grails in the cloud already. I will keep an eye on what SpringSource does because I expect they will do a great job of supporting Grails.