Cloud Foundry
James Foster is expaining CloudFoundry - a service VMWare is building out for public and private cloud services. Part of this presentation is an audience participation demo using CloudFoundry - I'd talk about that more, but we had issues getting the necessary parts installed on my Mac :) It looks cool, but it looks like the setup requires more than the handful of minutes I was able to devote to it.
The next bit you can follow along on the video once that's released - or contact James Foster, who I'm sure will be more than happy to talk you through it.
There are some interesting issues with getting Smalltalk into this kind of service - it's a monolithic image, as opposed to a small runtime that you muck with via small text files. Additionally, that image needs to run continuously, as opposed to running on demand only. Interestingly, the solution here looks a lot like what I do to run this blog (with the caveat that what I do is way less formalized).
- Push new code to service
- launch Smalltalk, load code, save image
- launch saved image
- Start HTTP Server on specified port
The result of all this some baseline support for a Gemstone service in the cloud - which is pretty cool.
Technorati Tags: gemstone, cloudfoundry, ruby