Reasonably Smart Platform, a cloud computing platform for web app developers (2)
I remember asking my brother a while ago what programming language people would still use in 10 years. I was suggesting Ruby, and since he’s into .NET, I thought he’d say C# or asp. To my surprise, Javascript was his immediate answer.
That was before words like AJAX or javascript libraries were mainstream. Javascript is now used in all sorts of flavour on the web, from dynamizing user interfaces, up to powering whole websites like gmail or 280Slides. In 2008 alone, we’ve seen the apparition of stand-alone javascript web frameworks like SproutCore or Objective-J.
A new service called the Reasonable Smart Platform aims to push further boundaries, by offering a platform for web developers that will host their application and store the data for them.
In practice, you open an account by using OpenId. You can then start a new host, or clone existing ones, with files hosted on RSP through git. Other programmers can also clone your host, and then push changes.
There is currently a minimal set of features. HTTP requests are taken care by bootstrap.js; you can also access the filesystem, store, retrieve and search data, and manage sessions. All of this is done with javascript; which is executed on the RSP server upon user requests.
If you go through the website, it seems raw; but the service is already functional. The website in itself uses RSP. Here is for instance a sample application done today, a demo made just for this post. It’s a board where visitors can leave a message, like what they are doing currently. If you have a RSP account, the code is hosted at http://mtw-demo.reasonablysmart.com:81/ if you want to play with it.
I’d like to believe that this is a strong contender to other cloud computing companies. They are actually looking for investors to fund and develop the project; it’s for instance a direct competitor to 10gen. Of course, there are many shortcomings (such as lack of documentation and examples); but I know how talented they are, seeing them working at blitzweekend so this shouldn’t be a problem.
I get a little “tired” seing all these “run javascript on the server side” companies. The business reality is companies have server-side source code that is *not* in javascript or ruby. It’s either .net, php, java, perl or some python.
Amazon has been succesful because it understood well what potential customers where out there and how their cloud tech can help them (EC2, S3, ..)
Not to mention there’s something utterly wrong about running a client side scripting language alone in the ‘cloud’.
I’m a heavy javascript developper but feel this “server side cloud” is completely misguided. As far as using server javascript, something like http://www.aptana.com/jaxer/ makes more sense to me. (.net ish)
There’s definetly a lot of opportunity in the “Platform as a service” world, happy to see there’s this kind of tech going in Montreal :)
Worth a mention is http://appjet.com/.
Jonathan,
Right.
Banks or other large IT departments will still stick to .NET or java.
But RSP is well beyond that. I don’t see any Fortune 500 company trying it any time soon. In its current form, I only see “fringe” hackers playing with it.
As about if makes more sense than .NET-ish platforms, I can’t make any judgement yet. Patterns come and go. First, we have to see what the platform can do and then give a final judgement. I believe myself there’s some value to it, and that we could see some novelty uses.
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