Jolt Awards: Coding Tools
, February 06, 2013 The best IDEs and coding tools of the past year
Finalist: ActiveState Stackato 2.4
Remember when having your business solutions in "The Cloud" was the solution for everything? Well, it hasn't quite worked out as fast as many people hoped; adoption by businesses especially for development on external clouds has been slow. But a new solution is Stackato from ActiveState, the well-known vendor of dynamic language IDEs and tools. Stackato enables companies and individuals to deploy private, Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities. ActiveState built Stackato on the Cloud Foundry PaaS from VMWare. It supports two versions: Stackato Micro Cloud, a free product available in four virtual machine packages, and Stackato Enterprise. The enhancements to Cloud Foundry made by ActiveState are impressive: multiple additional languages (ASP.NET, Clojure, Go, Java, Node.js, Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby), Virtual Appliance deployment, a Management Console to fill that missing feature in Cloud Foundry, and more. Momentum for Stackato is building: Last month, HP announced its own PaaS offering built on Stackato. Scalability is an obvious need for a cloud offering and Stackato adroitly opens the path for a company to start with a Micro Cloud installation and cluster additional instances. Stackato will auto-configure each clustered instance, and you can manage the clustering through Stackato's centralized cluster administration. What's not to like here?
Gary Evans