News

Java PaaS Provider Jelastic Updates Cloud Hosting Platform

• By John K. Waters
• August 18, 2013

Java-based Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider Jelastic last week announced another update of its rapidly evolving Java and PHP cloud hosting platform. Version 1.9.2 comes with a number of enhancements, including auto-deployment capabilities for users of GIT and SVN repositories, FTP/FTPS access to database servers, and support for PHP 5.5.

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

Support for the popular, open source code repositories tops the list of Jelastic COO Dmitry Sotnikov's favorite enhancements in this release.

"We have had GIT and SVN support in the cloud for a while now," Sotnikov told ADTmag. "But until now, people had to either integrate with some sort of continuous integration system (CI), such as Hudson or Jenkins, or they had to deploy manually. In this release, deployment is just a check box."

 Jelastic has also been providing FTP/FTPS access to application servers for a while, but this release extends that support to "all database servers," the company said. "Users get an easy and reliable way of file sharing and data transfer to and from their database servers in their Jelastic environments, including local backup files," Sotnikov added.

 The platform's support for PHP extends from 5.5 to 5.4 and 5.3. Users can now deploy PHP projects from a GIT repository with submodules/dependencies added.

Previous versions of the platform have supported scheduling of MySQL and MariaDB backups. This version adds support for scheduling of MongoDB Database backups. This update also gives a user the ability to configure memory settings and set custom parameters for his or her Java container; the ability to assign an internal IP to Jelastic's full-root-access virtual private server (VDS) components; and a new Search box, which users can access from the dashboard "to get the answers to the questions they are most interested in."

The company also provides plug-ins for Maven, Ant, Hudson, and Jenkins. The company recently added Apache TomEE to the list of application servers supported by the platform. That list also includes Tomcat (6 and 7), GlassFish, and Jetty. Jelastic also supports three SQL databases: MariaDB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL; and supports the non-SQL databases MongoDB and CouchDB.

 Palo Alto, Calif.-based Jelastic was founded in 2010 by Hivetext, a Zhytomyr, Ukraine-based startup focused on Java application development in the cloud. Ruslan Synytsky, founder and CEO of Jelastic, has said that his company's flagship platform is the first Java PaaS to provide "full application compatibility and developer control," and "the only choice for Java developers" who want to avoid lock-in.

 More information about the latest version of the Jelastic platform is available here.