Undaunted by sharing the same conference hall space as Mr. Ellison himself, Hivext Technologies has used its appearance at Oracle Open World and JavaOne this week to announced free beta availability of the Jelastic Platform-as-a-Service, a PaaS offering which aims to run any Java application in the cloud without code changes.
Hivext says that Java applications can be uploaded in minutes without programming and with no need to write for specific APIs to support the process. Application developers can choose which stack components they want and need, and their application will then run and scale on the Jelastic platform.
"Application developers can leverage existing Java skills on the Jelastic platform, which is the world's first cloud platform to host and auto-scale any Java application," claims Ruslan Synytskyy, CEO, Hivext Technologies. "Our mission is very simple: We make it easy to run Java code from the cloud, without locking customers into a single vendor."
Jelastic supports any JVM-based application including pure Java 6 or 7, JRuby, Scala, and Groovy. During the beta program, SQL databases supported are MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Non-SQL database support is provided for MongoDB and CouchDB. Supported application servers include Tomcat 6 and 7, GlassFish, and Jetty. Jelastic provides load balancing and caching though integrated nginx, and developer tools integration via Maven and Ant plug-ins.
Jelastic is described as being different from earlier Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings in that it will become available through a global network of hosted service providers so Java developers can find the right hosting option in their region. Prior to this open beta available to anyone, Jelastic has been in test since mid-2011 with more than 1,000 registered developers and some 500 applications deployed.
