Everyone’s talking about the “cloud” and what would a “killer app” look like.

Is SOASTA the killer app that cloud-watchers are waiting for?

Reuven Coven asserts as much in his blog post:

“Back to what I find interesting about this new scheme; traditionally performance testing has been a kind of “best guess” scenario. Although there are many testing frameworks available most of which create a hypothetical experience using a set of static machines typically limited to one or two geographic locations. With the emergence of a global supply of regional cloud providers SOASTA is tapping into almost limitless capacity to test your application environment in a proactive fashion. Until the emergence of cloud based infrastructures testing beyond a few hundred thousand users was impossible, now you can slap together a few regionalized clouds and realistically see how 3 million or more users around the globe will actually experience your application and infrastructure. This is specially important in emerging markets such as China and India where even a low usage site can routinely get millions of users.”

What is SOASTA? According to their blog post:

“For the past several months we (SOASTA) have been performing global load and performance tests by leveraging multiple cloud platforms (cross-cloud testing) to generate and simulate Web traffic originating from around the world. Up until last November we had been limited to using Amazon’s New Jersey locations. Now we have access to and can generate traffic (load) from 15 locations around the globe. For the several customers that have experienced it, the results have been amazing. While simulating global traffic is not all together new, using cloud computing makes it, for the first time, fast, scalable, and affordable. Tomorrow we will announce the availability of The First Cloud-Based Global Test Platform. This New Test Platform is NOW available to all corporations around the world for Global Load testing on there web applications.   Prices starts at $1,000/Test Hour.”

SOASTA is an idea whose time as come because for the first time in history, by leveraging cross-cloud testing, load and performance testing can now be simulated – it might even make the concept of an SLA obsolete – maybe thing would be cross-cloud l&p testing certifications?

posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo

David Marko has very specific metrics in evaluating web frameworks. Peculiar to his development paradigm he intimates that his “primary concern, when evaluating the web frameworks, is how it can help me in developing apps for my many small clients. I’m not developing one or two big applications, but many small (maybe 30-40 different) for not one client but many different clients(companies) . Typical scenario for the client are the many apps that are developed within a few years. The applications must talk to each other in some way, must share common data and must be maintainable easily.”

On the following points, he evaluates Grails vs. Django vs. Web2Py:

”

• how to share authentication/authorization among applications
• how to share data, that are common for all applications (e.g. client’s info must be available for projects application and technical support app as well)
• how the data migration works? I need to work on development version of application, when approved just simply move application/database changes to production.  I need this for many clients so I need some flexible solution
• how the framework can collaborate with the other systems that clients are using usually (accounting system, proprietary applications) It mostly means ability to use some communication standard for data exchange(webservices, ODBC)”

Guess what he has to say about Web2Py?

”

• web2py approach is very inovative and old one together. Developer just starts the included wsgi server(cherrypy included) and can create and manage(develop) projects using web interface. Its very Zope like approach except that entire project is filesystem based, so user can use his favourite Python IDE. Different apps can communicate with each other, development  seems to be very fast at least for simple things.
• developer can run included wsgi server even for production and updates the apps without sacrificing the server restart. This allows nice development flexibility
• database schema migration is included
• the most common changes made to apps are immediately availabe without application redeployment or server restart required
• it’s Python based framework, so many Python libraries are available”

So, it looks like it’s Web2Py FTW! Check out the comments on his comparison.

posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo

We’re going to be introducing this new category called Web2PyWatch basically to inspire us and all the QuadraForte blog readers out there on how far Web2Py can push the envelope of cloud computing.

First up is Phylografter (beta version) just released by Richard Ree). As dechronization (EvolutionPhylogeneticTreesComparativeMethods) points out:

“Phylografter is a web2py-based application that allows users to upload trees or use existing ones in order to join them for the purpose of creating a single large phylogeny. The current demo version can be downloaded or run on a web server, and handles up to 7,000 tips. There are thousands of trees already uploaded into the tree database, which can be used to create new glomograms. It is presently a bit plant-heavy–not a big surprise, given the context of its creation.“

How complex are the computations that Phylografter does? EOL Biodiversity Synthesis Group gives a description:

“Knowledge of the Tree of Life can greatly enhance our understanding of the evolution-ecology relationship, an active and dynamic area of current research. A collaborative eort, funded by NCEAS, is currently underway to reconstruct a comprehensive evolutionary tree (phylogeny) of North American vascular plants, and to investigate the geographic pattern of species diversity at a continental scale and how it relates to ecosystem processes.

The scale of this phylogeny is unprecedented, and strategies for assembling trees of this size (about 25,000 species) are not well developed. This method-focused meeting was designed to refine approaches for assembling large phylogenies and to train students in their use.”

If  you want to see Phylografter at work check it out here and also give your kudos to Richard Ree.

posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo

After finding out how to deploy Spree over Heroku (as an academic experiment in school) – here’s the next step: Deploying something like Spree or Substruct over Web2Py. Why Web2Py? As this site explains, Web2Py is a:

“Free and open source full-stack enterprise framework for agile development of fast, secure and portable database-driven web-based applications. Written and programmable in Python.”

also

”

• Runs on Linux, Mac, Windows, Windows Mobile, and on the Google App Engine
• Requires no installation and can run off a USB drive
• Has no configuration files. You just unzip it and click on it
• Includes a multi-threaded wsgi-compliant web-server (also works with Apache and others)
• Includes a transaction-safe relational database (sqlite)
• Includes a web-based integrated development environment (demo)
• Includes a ticketing system to help you debug deployed applications
• Includes a sophisticated Database Abstraction Layer that can handle joins, left joins, nested selects, aggregates, transactions and distributed transactions. Writes SQL code for you, transparently and in real time, for SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, FireBird and Oracle
• Automatically generates a web-based database administrative interface for your applications
• Prevents the most common types of vulnerabilities: Cross Site Scripting, Injection Flaws, and Malicious File Execution
• Enforces good Software Engineer practices (Model-View-Controller design, Server-side form validation, postbacks)”

Go through the site for more of Web2Py’s functionalities. I’d like to see something industry-grade run on it.

Want to know who’s working on this? Check out the new start-up I’m involved with, it’s QuadraForte and I’m now their new software evangelist!

posted by Paul “The Pageman” Pajo