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Engine Yard, provider of a popular platform as a service (PaaS), announced support for Java in the cloud, an incremental step for the PaaS player that started out wedded to Ruby.
Engine Yard launched in 2006 as a PaaS focused on Ruby on Rails. The platform expanded to support Ruby, JRuby, PHP, Node.js and now Java.
The San Francisco-based company chose the perfect venue to announce its support for Java—the JavaOne 2013 conference being held this week in San Francisco.
Company officials said the move to support Java further extends the flexibility and choice Engine Yard offers its customers, which range from Web 2.0 startups to large corporations. This latest enhancement is yet another milestone in the Engine Yard vision to deliver a cloud application platform that gives developers and IT managers a greater variety of choices for languages, components, deployment options and infrastructure, as well as more granular control of their environments.
Moreover, Engine Yard also announced that it is welcoming Oracle as one of its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers.
“We have listened closely to our customers’ requirements. Increasingly, they include the need to innovate with new apps and services on the Java platform, extend existing Java apps and migrate them to a cloud application platform,” said Rob Walters, CTO of Engine Yard, in a statement. “By delivering support for Java, we’re able to provide our industry leading PaaS across a variety of markets and use cases. We also continue to expand our list of infrastructure providers and look forward to offering support for Oracle Cloud.”
Java is the most popular programming language for corporate application development and was listed as the top language choice for cloud app developers, according to the August 2013 Forrester Research report titled “Who Are The Enterprise Cloud Developers?”Java is currently rated as the second most popular language on the TIOBE Index of most popular programming languages.
Modern distributed and cloud applications span multiple languages. Developers often choose to build back-end services in Java and front-end components in Ruby, PHP or JavaScript. With Java support, developers will be able to choose the best language for each component of their distributed apps and deploy to the cloud, Engine Yard officials said.
“Being able to build, deploy and manage Java apps on Engine Yard will open a lot of new opportunities for us,” said Tim Merkel, partner at Big Compass, an Engine Yard PaaS customer, in a statement. “Our enterprise customers are looking to share their core HR and accounting data with partners and employees via mobile, without deploying those enterprise apps outside their four walls. With Java support on Engine Yard, we can help them build mobile apps and deploy to the cloud, while relying on Engine Yard DevOps expertise in scaling and supporting enterprise-level apps.”
Engine Yard support for Java will give developers the ability to deploy apps on an Engine Yard stack with an Ubuntu Linux distribution optimized for running Java. It will feature a variety of capabilities, enabling users to gain end-to-end visibility into platform operations and capacity, conduct “production-like” testing, and track environment changes; take advantage of faster deployment and enhanced fault tolerance and disaster recovery via groups of load balancers, application and database servers; and intuitively manage environments and deploy Java applications with a new Angular.js and Node.js user interface, or incorporate into an automated workflow using a scriptable command-line interface.
Customers can sign up for early access to run Java apps on Engine Yard, which will be available within 30 days. Go to www.engineyard.com/java for more information.
Engine Yard supports multiple IaaS providers, so customers can choose the best infrastructure for their applications. Engine Yard has partnered with Amazon Web Services, Verizon Terremark and Microsoft Windows Azure and is working with Oracle to enable customers to deploy applications on Oracle Cloud when it becomes generally available.