Thanks Apple..

..for feeling you should screw me as a loyal customer with a hardware refresh less than 6 months after I bought my "new" iPad..

Another PaaS in the wall?

I received a LinkedIn invite recently to try out a new PaaS service called Uhuru (www.uhurucloud.com). I haven't played with cloud VM's and services before, mainly due to time and interest constraints, but hey what the heck, I had an hour or so to kill...

After a painless signup, you are presented with this screen:



It's pretty sparse stuff at the moment. You can push a bunch of pre-packed modules, which are the usual mix of CRM/PHP applications, create/rename/remove your Cloud and define services; the following are available:

And this is as far as you would get from the web based UI. In order to do any real work, you'd need to use their .NET GUI, or a command line client; and this is one of my first gripes. Seeing as they call this bit a "Service" , I would expect a wider mix of types here e.g. a Java web app container. All things being equal, I would prefer if I could deploy from the web and the command line, and dispense with the .NET local GUI.

Using the .NET GUI has been a mixed experience. It's clearly rough around the edges, but mostly functional. It will now and then get mixed up when you delete a deployed App and keep displaying it's status as "DELETING", although it's been removed from the tree at the left hand side.

Deploying is fairly easy. Right click on apps, select "Push" and you are presented with this menu:

You can define your framework or have the GUI detect it for you. It did get my app type wrong though, more on it shortly. Once you've defined your app and tied it to the services it requires, it's time to push and that's that...

Or not. Unfortunately, as of the time of writing this, I've not been able to deploy an albeit non-trivial web app, but with a very standard WAR structure; The command line client was equally cryptic

 and therein lie my gripes:

• The UI and command line need much better feedback. I simply got a failure to push the app and had no idea why.
• You cannot push an exploded WAR. I see no real reason why this should not be possible
• The GUI got my application type wrong; it thought it was a Spring app just by virtue of it having an applicationContext.xml
• I cannot edit the Tomcat server.xml properties so no DataSource access via JNDI.
• I cannot create a DB once my instance has spun up, but I can drop the existing one.

These things aside, the whole premise looks promising. Of course, there's the little issue of a pricing structure, especially given the big bull in the corner (hello Amazon) but it's early days.