AWS Short Takes for Friday, April 18, 2008

Time for an Inbox cleanup...

I met developer Chris Richardson in Philadelphia last month. Chris is a seasoned Java developer and the author of POJOs in Action.

He told me that he had just released CloudTools. This is a set of tools for deploying and testing Java EE applications on Amazon EC2. It consists of AMIs that are configured to work with Apache Tomcat and to work with EC2Deploy, the EC2Deploy core framework (described here), and a Maven plugin which uses EC2Deploy. Once the plugin has been configured, one command will launch the appropriate number of EC2 instances, configure a master MySQL database, populate it with data, configure zero or more MySQL slaves, configure one or more Tomcat servers, deploy the actual web application, and then configure an Apache instance which will load balance across all of the Tomcat instances (whew!).

Tarzan is an set of PHP 5 modules which provide straightforward, object-oriented access to Amazon S3, EC2, SQS, and the Amazon Associates Web Service, with planned support for SimpleDB as well. Currently in late-beta, most of the code is accompanied by unit tests. It requires access to a few common PHP extensions such as SimpleXML and PEAR HTTP Request. Tarzan was used to build Warpshare. The author is seeking patches, new code, and bug reports from the community.

We have just published the code for a Javascript-powered EC2 scratchpad in our Resource Center.

You can load this code on to the server of your choice, or you can simply unpack it into a directory on your desktop machine. Once loaded, simply open up index.html, enter your AWS keys, and start exploring the EC2 APIs.

The scratchpad provides a form-based interface to each of the function calls. It also computes and displays the complete signed URLs needed to actually make the calls into the EC2 cloud. The scratchpad can be used to learn about how to make calls to EC2 or as a cross-check for your own service invocation and request signing code. The return value from each call is displayed in raw XML form.

In a new Business Week cover story, Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos discusses his approach to innovation, thinking for the long term, our focus on the needs of customers, and our company culture.

This focus on the needs of our customers is very real and permeates everything that we do at. The information that we gather from meeting with developers, from reading commentary on blog posts (many of which show up on the AWS Buzz), and from our interaction on our developer forums is an intrinsic part of our product planning process.

Speaking of customers, we've been adding a lot of new customer-generated content to our Resource Center. Mitch Garnaat wrote about his Son of Monster Muck Mash Mashup, and also contributed an EC2 AMI. A guy named Mark contributed an S3 library for the Runtime Revolution language. Brenton Simpson wrote an ActionScript 3 library for SimpleDB. I've been tracking all of this content by simply watching the RSS feed for the Documents section of the Resource Center.

That's about all I have time for right now!

-- Jeff;

Comments

[Valentin]

Hi !

You seem to have forgotten one link, you write "the EC2Deploy core framework (described here)" - and probably 'here' should have been a link (but isn't). The link probably meant to go to: http://chris-richardson.blog-city.com/running_jee_applications_on_amazon_ec2_or_deploying_to_20_m.htm