News

PaaS Provider Apprenda Adds Java Support

• By John K. Waters
• January 28, 2014

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider Apprenda has released a new version of its namesake product this week with new support for enterprise Java developers. The newly launched Apprenda 5.0 also comes with a revamped developer portal and dynamic scaling enhancements.

But the big news in this release is the support for Java applications; the company had previously focused exclusively on the .NET stack. "It was the single largest homogenous block of developers in the enterprise, and we felt that it was underserved," Rakesh Malhorta, Apprenda vice president, told ADTmag. "Java is a little more fragmented. But now, by expanding to Java, we cover roughly 80 percent of enterprise apps. People ask me about other languages and frameworks, but we're not trying to get the maximum number of languages or frameworks, but the maximum number of applications in our target market."

Apprenda doesn't offer a hosted or cloud variant of its product. Instead the company licenses software that its enterprise customers run on the infrastructure of their choice; a private cloud, public cloud or both.

And the company is also focused on development within a whole-company context that includes developers, ops and production teams.

"Most companies that talk about platform-as-a-service really pound the table with the developer message," Malhorta said. "And we certainly do to, but we've learned that you can build the greatest features in the world for developers -- which we definitely try to do -- but if there are no controls or guardrails in place, you don't get broadly adopted. The trick with policy is, how do you make it seamless to the developer without hitting them with all this bureaucracy that they've had to deal with for the past 20 years in a new form factor."

The solution, Malhorta said, is what his company is billing as the industry's first API for controlling dynamic scaling. This feature is designed to allow developers to scale applications automatically in response to user traffic, and to set constraints to ensure that compliance requirements are met.  

"Our ultimate goal is to make developing applications simpler for everyone involved," he said.

The list of new features in Apprenda 5.0 includes: enhanced bootstrapping policies; native support for the Oracle Database; a "simplified developer experience" for troubleshooting apps (including log export, better contextual search, and threading); an archive filtering feature that gives developers the ability to create regular expression matches and replace rules as part of their archive upload; and an enhanced tenant membership feature, designed to make it possible for a user to belong to multiple tenants while allowing the platform to disambiguate authorization automatically.