[okfn-discuss] Use Cloud tools to create Open Data apps?

Fri Feb 17 09:05:29 UTC 2012

On 11 February 2012 10:51, Neil McEvoy <neil.mcevoy at l5consulting.net> wrote:
>
> Hey folks
>
> I'm looking to create a 'How to create open data apps' guide kinda thing,
> from a slant of the Cloud tools you might use.
>
> So the first thing I need to do is establish if this is even possible, and
> who/how might it work. In short, can any one shed any light or experiences
> of using tools like Google AppEngine, Force.com or any other 'Platform as a
> Service' toolsets for creating open data apps? How do they do it at the
> moment, is it mainly PHP web app type scripting?

I've only really looked at AppEngine but as far as I can tell these
platforms take one of two approaches.

AppEngine and similar provided a set of APIs for storage, data etc and
run code in a sandboxed environment. At the time I looked into it you
could only write applications in Java, and google provided a pretty
decent set of support for the Eclipse IDE to help you do so. They
might well have added other language support since.

Other systems, AWS etc, expose something much closer to having a bare
machine available, so the software stack is up to you. AWS requires
you to code more defensively than you might on your own servers,
applications are expected to cope with servers being shut down
underneath them, volatile data stores etc.

My overall impression is that it's relatively simple to deploy to
these platforms if you're already familiar with the approach to design
you have to have to write big distributed bits of software, and
potentially full of traps otherwise!

Bear in mind that I'm certainly not an expert, I'm only really
replying because no-one else has :) I've written a lot of distributed
systems code but none of it was deployed to these kinds of service
platform.

Cheers,

Tom