JumpBox

Tempe, Ariz.  (Press Release) ~ December 17, 2008 — JumpBox, publisher of virtual appliances which provide the easiest way to trial, develop, and deploy applications, today announced the release of 38 Open Source applications to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The release enables server application deployment, configuration, and management almost completely independent of any user hardware.

Organizations have long sought to empower themselves with software that enhances productivity,” says Kimbro Staken, CEO, JumpBox. “JumpBox now offers the ability to do so without procuring hardware, or downloading any software at all.”

JumpBox offers small to mid-sized organizations a library of Open Source applications packaged as pre-built, pre-configured virtual appliances through JumpBox Open, its annual subscription service.  Public Amazon Machine Images (AMI) for twelve JumpBox applications, including Ruby on Rails, Drupal, SugarCRM and more have been made available for free. AMIs for the full suite of 38 applications are available to plus and premium subscribers to JumpBox Open.

“The combination of JumpBox and EC2 signals a new era of agility and flexibility for virtualized organizations,” says Staken. “Imagine enabling better customer service almost instantly with SugarCRM or deploying a Ruby on Rails application for testing in minutes. EC2 provides cost effective, scalable computing power; JumpBox provides the application packaged for instant deployment.”

A JumpBox packages an application’s software, dependencies, and application data into a single virtual application that deploys in minutes locally, or hosted to major computing, virtualization, and cloud computing platforms. Among other enhanced features, a JumpBox provides an intuitive user interface to quickly guide users through deployment, a web-based control panel for simplified management of system functions, and a backup system that enables data security and portability.

For more information, visit JumpBox on the web at http://www.jumpbox.com

All brands, product names, company names, trademarks and service marks are the properties of their respective owners. All rights reserved.

JumpBox Media Contact:
Steven Shaffer
JumpBox, Inc.
http://www.jumpbox.com
480.967.5897

Under the overpass after an autumn rain, by the railroad tracks.
I-96 at the Southfield Freeway. Detroit, Michigan. October 2007.

From G. S. George’s Flickr Photostream.

Google goes green today with an alternate logo to celebrate Earth Day, which the USA started celebrating on April 22, 1970.

Michael Arrington says Twitter is now such a vital part of the technology ecology, that service outages barely matter, and as he says “I need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.”

Wired Magazine looks back to frightful days in World War I, remembering the trench warfare — chemical weapons; poison gas — on this day in 1915.

I’m thankful to be alive on the privileged planet today, and I realize that every breath is a gift. I need the earth more than the earth needs me… I need more oxygen, just like SlashDot needs more electricity to keep the creation/evolution debate going.

Yesterday, WordPress wizard Matt Mullenweg, jazzed up his blog with a new spring theme. I wonder if he designed it that way, or it just evolved by itself.

Zeldman (ALA) published a couple interesting and helpful articles on the Why and How of Ruby on Rails this morning.

Creating new stuff isn’t easy. Meticulous and beautiful designs don’t just happen by accident. Computer programs don’t write themselves. However, some scientists (like Richard Dawkins) theorize that DNA wrote itself. So, if you follow that theory, you can Twine your PC to some random Twitter feeds, go to the beach all afternoon, and when you get back, your new Ruby on Rails program will have written itself. Try explaining that one to your boss. Or better yet, find some VCs who will invest in it. (The only catch is that they might have to wait billions and billions of years for the ROI). That plan might work for you… but for programmers looking for some good advice today, you might want to check out StackOverflow.com (a new advice service for programmers) — from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.

Back to the Planet – After a flaming descent, and a “scary crash landing”, Korean, Russian, and American astronauts are glad to be back on planet earth after a visit to the International Space Station. Yi So-yeon, a nano-technology engineer from Seoul, Korea — spent 11 days in space. Peggy Whitson had been gone for 192 days (and needed help walking), and now Peggy holds the American record for most days lived in outer space — 377 days.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

The video is kind of funny, and does reveal some tidbits of truth about the complexity of enterprise java development. But those who have been reading about Ruby and JRuby for a while realize that you can run Ruby and Ruby On Rails with Java.

But if you think about it… guess that goes to show you there’s a-lotta-truth here.

1. the Mongrel parser, the root of Mongrel speed and security
2. Event Machine, I/O library with high scalability, performance and stability
3. Rack, a minimal interface between webservers and Ruby frameworks

So, Thin is the new dog in town. Did I mention that Thin is fast and flexible?

Thank-you Marc Cournoyer !