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From Portals to the Cloud: Extending the eXo-Red Hat Partnership

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Almost two years ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat, with the goal of building the best open source portal framework ever: GateIn. Today we announced that we’re extending this partnership by offering an easy way to develop apps for OpenShift, Red Hat’s new Platform-as-a-Service offering. Before I dive into the details of how eXo Cloud IDE will work with OpenShift, I’ll quickly recap what we’ve done with Red Hat to date.

To put it simply, GateIn is the foundation for both eXo and Red Hat enterprise offerings. For Red Hat, this product is JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform 5 (EPP). We also use it as the core runtime for our own user experience platform, eXo Platform 3. Here’s a simple visual of this:

Our partnership reached another important milestone at the end of 2010, when Red Hat announced Site Publisher, an extension for EPP that is powered by eXo’s WCM technology. With EPP-SP, Red Hat customers can create and manage websites on top of the EPP portal.

Site Publisher is ideal for building sites that need to mix content and transactional applications that integrate well with customer’s IT environment. In many cases these are customer-facing portals, which are typically strategic projects for our common customers.

The natural next step was introducing eXo Platform 3.0 for EPP-SP. This adds a large set of user experience features like document management, workflow, communication and collaboration tools, to enterprise social networks. It also includes the same IDE as our now-famous eXo Cloud IDE. This is the full stack:

We recommend this complete stack to customers already using Red Hat technology, since everything has been tested and certified together, from the JBoss EAP application server to the RHEL Operating System!

I’m excited to share that today we are again expanding our collaboration with Red Hat, going beyond portals to the Cloud.

Red Hat’s OpenShift PaaS announcement sends a strong message that the company is serious about becoming a leader in the PaaS market. They have the vision and already a great partner ecosystem. I’m really excited that eXo can be one of the first to integrate with this new public Cloud offering.

Earlier this year, we announced our own cloud strategy. Part of this will be offering several free online services for PaaS developers. eXo Cloud IDE, which is already available, is an online development environment (IDE) that developers can use to create applications in the cloud (collaborating with up to 5 other developers in their dedicated domain), then deploy to the PaaS of their choice.

Today, we announce the native integration of eXo Cloud IDE and Red Hat OpenShift. A developer in eXo Cloud IDE can create a Ruby application and easily deploy it to OpenShift.

The integration is made possible by Git, which is now supported by both the eXo Cloud IDE and OpenShift. A simple push of the application source code from the IDE will trigger the automatic (re)deployment of the application in the PaaS. This push action can be used both during the development phase as a “test as you code” tool (where you need a quick visual result on your changes) and to do production deployment.

Working with the cloud team at Red Hat has been a really rewarding experience, just as it has been collaborating with the JBoss team around GateIn. The people are open, talented and hard-working, and seem to genuinely care about their partners. I look forward to collaborating around OpenShift, and to seeing what other great things our partnership will bring in the future.

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History of eXo Cloud IDE

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Today we announced our strategy for bringing enterprise portals to the cloud, along with services that will make it easier, faster and more collaborative to develop apps for PaaS deployments. But to understand where eXo is going, we need to look back to when we first started working on improving the developer experience.

The idea for our web-based IDE originated over three years ago. At that time several customers, who were already using version 2 of eXo Platform to build websites and intranets, wanted an online tool to view, edit and redeploy web content templates.

To provide this capability, we decided to implement a simple HTML, JavaScript and CSS code editor, leveraging Google Web Toolkit. While prototyping it, we soon realized we were on to something big, and our ambition for the project grew.

It wasn’t long before the team expanded to 6 core developers, with a goal of building a full-fledged online IDE. The IDE would allow our customers to dynamically customize and enhance the capabilities of the platform, by building and deploying REST APIs, OpenSocial Gadgets or simple HTML/Javascript apps. This first version of the IDE was introduced in eXo Platform 3, released in September 2010.

Building apps in eXo Platform 3 is based on standards, such as OpenSocial Gadgets for the front end, JAX-RS for the business logic layer and JCR for persistence. Developers can use auto-completion for faster coding, access a cool outline view, or see the syntax colored for each file mime-type. The IDE was an important part of transforming eXo Platform from an enterprise portal to a complete user experience platform for Java. Now customers can customize their social intranets with new gadgets, or expose new REST APIs to mobile devices.

It wasn’t long before we decided to make a standalone offering for the IDE. This decision was based on the strong positive reaction from our customers of course, but also because we saw how the IDE dramatically transformed our own intranet virtually overnight. We set up the eXo intranet on eXo Platform 3 (after first migrating our corporate website), and the response by our own development teams was really eye-opening. Our engineers – even those who had never used the IDE before – were innovating and creating new intranet capabilities in their spare time. These new gadgets can be used by other eXo-ers in their own personal dashboards, and a few of them have already been packaged and offered as plugins for any eXo Platform user (available in the eXo Resource Center).

Almost immediately we heard from several ISVs who were interested in embedding the IDE as part of their own offering. OEM deals were signed – we’ll start announcing these in the near future – and several more are in the pipe.

The evolution of the IDE as a standalone component was complete when Amazon announced their PaaS offering, Elastic Beanstalk. We realized we could offer the IDE with a Tomcat server as an AMI (Amazon Machine Image). This allows Java developers can deploy a WAR application in the Amazon PaaS, then quickly extend it with REST APIs and a UI provided by the coupled online IDE.

But the real goal of eXo Cloud IDE is more ambitious. We will provide a cloud service where teams of developers can build, share and deploy applications quickly – in any major PaaS currently available.

To offer this multi-tenant Cloud IDE service, we leveraged the work of another eXo team that has been tasked with making eXo Platform ready for private cloud deployments (available as part of the upcoming eXo Platform 3.5, which will be released later this year). This means the eXo Cloud IDE service relies on eXo Platform’s multi-tenant layer, so every developer team can get its own isolated data and server side processes.

This multi-tenancy is achieved at the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) level, allowing us to host several teams on the same OS virtual machine, which dramatically reduces the cost of hosting. And because eXo relies on the revenue stream from our enterprise on-premise software product line (and we would love to have you as a customer), we do not need to monetize this new IDE-as-a-service offering. That is the reason why we can make this service free of charge now and in the future.

Today we announced the first version of eXo Cloud IDE. It is limited to a relatively small number of teams, but we will open it more in the coming weeks. To participate in the private beta, you need to create an account. From there you will be able to invite 5 developers to your team to collaborate on your development projects. With this launch you can quickly build and deploy HTML 5 mobile apps, social network apps, Mashups, Google Gadgets, Netvibes widgets or REST APIs.

Improvements planned for the near future will allow you to pull a Java application from Github, edit it, test it and deploy it to most of the Java PaaS available in the market (through a Git push in CloudBees for instance, or a WAR deployment to App Engine, Red Hat Makara and VMForce). But we don’t plan to limit support only to Java PaaS. The IDE is designed to be language-independent, so we will also be able to support other PaaS like Heroku (Ruby), Azure (C#), or even the Python version of App Engine.

Cloud computing is clearly more than a buzzword – it is completely transforming our industry. Most of the applications we know today will be used in the cloud tomorrow, including development environments. Accessing and editing apps from many devices, deploying them seamlessly on dev, staging or production environments, sharing code online or managing IDE upgrades or configuration for across teams are now simple tasks. This is all made possible because of the Cloud IDE. I hope you’ll join us in trying it out, and let us know what you think.

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eXo Extends Enterprise Portals to the Cloud

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011

Company introduces the first cloud-ready user experience platform and launches a free new Cloud IDE developer service for Java Platform as a Service (PaaS)

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif (Mar. 15, 2011) — eXo, a Java portal technologies pioneer, today unveiled its roadmap to take modern enterprise portals, gadgets and mashups to cloud computing environments. For enterprise companies that have invested in Java, eXo is offering a path to the cloud that will help reduce costs, simplify administration and substantially shorten time-to-deployment for new applications. In support of this roadmap, eXo is making two announcements today:

  • eXo introduces eXo Platform 3.5, the first and only multi-tenant user experience platform (UXP) for Java systems. A UXP is the evolution of the enterprise portal to support a variety of consumer web technologies that affect how people interact with the web today. In addition to multi-tenancy and cloud management capabilities, eXo Platform 3.5 will feature improvements to its web-based IDE, making it easier to write, test and deploy gadgets, mashups, HTML5 and content applications.
  • eXo is launching eXo Cloud IDE, a new service offering available today as a private beta. The first of a set of free cloud services planned for 2011, eXo Cloud IDE is a hosted development environment that facilitates social coding–the collaborative development of gadgets and mashups that can be deployed directly to a PaaS. eXo Cloud Services enhance PaaS development and will leverage core technologies in eXo Platform 3.5, including multi-tenancy, social and collaboration features.

“Over the last six months, our customers have found a real Java alternative to SharePoint with eXo Platform 3.0, and they’re deploying transactional websites, managing web and social content and building next-generation gadgets and dashboards with it,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO of eXo. “In 2011, eXo is once again changing the game for enterprise portals with deployment options that meet today’s computing requirements. With our cloud-ready user experience platform and PaaS developer services, eXo is paving a path to the cloud for Java enterprises.”

A Cloud-Ready User Experience Platform

eXo Platform is an integrated UXP based on the open source GateIn portal for building and deploying transactional websites, managing web and social content and creating gadgets and dashboards. It lets companies leverage their existing Java infrastructure, while accommodating changing user behavior driven by consumer web technologies such as social networks, social publishing, forums, etc…

eXo Platform 3.5 makes it easier to develop, extend and deploy modern enterprise portals, gadgets and mashups in cloud computing environments. Furthermore, it opens up cloud deployment options for multiple users, including:

  • Service Providers: Manage portals with a single user experience across many customers. Shared OS multi-tenancy means lower cost for service providers with only one JVM to worry about.
  • IT Operations: Manage and monitor a private or public cloud from within one portal. A single user experience makes it easy to learn and lowers support costs.
  • Users: Add enterprise social and collaboration capabilities easily. Embed business applications in dashboards. Extend the portal by aggregating private and public cloud applications. A smartphone or tablet user interface means the portal can be accessible on those devices without extra coding.

General availability for eXo Platform 3.5 is planned for the second half of 2011.

eXo Cloud Services

eXo Cloud Services is a set of free services that will enhance PaaS development. The first service out the gate is eXo Cloud IDE, launching today as a private beta open to development teams. Key features and benefits in the Cloud IDE roadmap include:

  • Web Development: A single environment for wiring REST services, HTML5, Gadgets and structured content to create rich mashups and web apps on the fly. Because coding is done in a production environment, moving from code to testing and deployment can be done much faster.
  • Quick Setup of New Domains: As a multi-tenant service, creation of a new network is almost instant. Developers can pick a domain, invite their development team and start coding in their own IDE.
  • Source Control Integration: Support for Git and SVN.
  • Collaborative Development: Enables social coding with activity streams and collaboration tools like wikis and forums.
  • Deployment Flexibility: Ability to deploy locally on the Cloud IDE platform, or remotely via Git push or classic WAR deployment.
  • PaaS-agnostic: Develop and package Java web projects as webarchive (.war) and deploy on popular Java PaaS. In the future, eXo intends to extend support beyond Java to Rails, Node.js, Play and .NET, among others.

Additional Online Resources

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