News

Java PaaS Jelastic Supports App Deployment on Nginx Web Server

• By John K. Waters
• October 27, 2011

Hivetext Technologies announced this week that its Java-based Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Jelastic will be supporting the Nginx Web server.

Jelastic is actually a cloud hosting platform designed for hosted service providers. It runs any Java application in the cloud, the company says, without code or language changes, and without the need to write for specific APIs. It supports any JVM-based application, including apps developed with Java 6, Java 7, Groovy, JRuby and Scala.

Nginx (pronounced "engine-X") is a Web server and a reverse proxy server for IMAP, HTTP, POP3 and SMTP protocols. It’s known as a high-performance Web server with a low memory footprint. Integrating with the Nginx software allows Jelastic to provide content caching, load balancing, compression, bandwidth policing, connection multiplexing, SSL offload and media streaming capabilities, according to the company.

Founded in 2010, Hivetext is a Zhytomyr, Ukraine-based startup focused on Java application development in the cloud. Its flagship Jelastic platform, still in beta, supports three SQL databases: MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL. It also provides non-SQL database support for MongoDB and CouchDB. And its list of support app servers includes Tomcat (6 and 7), GlassFish, and Jetty. Jelastic provides its users with developer tools through plug-ins for the Apache Maven and Apache Ant.

The Nginx integration is a big deal for the fledgling company. Web watchers at Netcraft reported an increase of 1.6 million Nginx-active Web sites in October, resulting in an increase in its market share to 11.28 percent. "If current trends continue," the Netcraft report states, "Nginx will soon overtake Microsoft to have the second largest number of active sites."

The integration news also got a big nod from the creator of the Nginx Web server, Igor Sysoev, who is also listed as an advisor on the Jelastic project. "I’m very glad to see Nginx now readily available to millions of Java developers in preconfigured hosting environments," Sysoev said in a statement. "Jelastic creates new opportunities for existing and new Java hosting offerings and it is great news for developers that Nginx is now part of it."

The Jelastic platform has been in test since mid-2011, and the beta is now available free to U.S. Java developers through its new partner, Web hoster ServInt. The platform is available in Europe through another partner, Host Europe. The company claims more than 1,500 registered Jelastic developers have deployed nearly 1,000 applications since mid-2011.