Yeah, we’ve seen a ton of online application builders before – DabbleDB, Zoho Creator, LongJump, Coghead and WyaWorks, among others. And Salesforce weighed in with their own Force.com in late 2007.
Bungee Connect , which leaves private beta today, competes with all of these. But the company, based in Utah, thinks they have the advanced features to attract a much different audience than most of those startups. They’re targeting hard core developers, not non-developers who want a way to create simple software programs to solve problems at the office.
Bungee Connect is a single online environment for developers to write, test, deploy and host applications. Like Force.com, it is a platform-as-a-service. The service is free until end users actually start using the products built and deployed on the service.
Dana Gardner wrote an excellent overview of the service a year ago when Bungee Connect was first introduced.
Are these guys aware of that OTHER company? You know, the one that made Halo?
1.) By the looks of it, they are trying hard to feign ignorance!
Peyton
http://www.techbanyan.com
Having entire development environments online should promote crowd-based software, where components are forever tweaked, customized, and extended.
The online mixing and mashing of software components should yield interesting results…should help the web move beyond the current phase of structured data into something more behavior-based.
We are destined to turn into the Borg…resistance is futile!
i am wondering how many “serious” developers will really adapt to the new system introduced by the bungee builder. i work with asp.net and i don’t know abt other ppl, but i found it hard to adapt to a new IDE and it may not surpass the functionalities of the .net framework. Based on these, i think an environment for non-developers has more advantage than one for serious developers only. just my 2 cents.
How much money and how many full time programers do you guys think a project like this need?
It looks amazing.
Bungee Connect is a single online environment for developers to write, test, deploy and host applications.
Ah, so, it’s vim over ssh?
This kind of a technology is neither for the novices (who prefer tweaking their CMSs ) nor for the experts (who would build custom controls using latest frameworks ). Plus what kind of service level guarantees are provided ? Would someone trust their start-up to another start-up when even Amazon can’t give a 100% uptime guarantee for the AWS. The days of building sites with basic functionality are over, so would this company supply the basic app code, so that it can be expanded/re-engineered to robustify/customize and scale up the app.
I thought this looked kind of cool until I noticed you have to program using a proprietary language called Bungee Logic. It claims and looks to be similar to Javascript & C++ but do I really want to learn the idiosyncricies of yet another language. Come on guys, I thought we were past that…
compsign: you wrote: “The days of building sites with basic functionality are over”…oh yeah, we agree. Try it out. Have a look…
Zizi: you wrote: “How much money and how many full time programers do you guys think a project like this need? It looks amazing.”
Thanks…to answer your question: the Bungee Labs team is made up of around 35 full time employees, mostly pm, dev, test and hosted opps people….as you imply, it’s not trivial project
Steve – there are some very good reasons for coming up with Bungee Logic. (disclaimer – I work at Bungee Labs). Your reaction was my reaction when I first learnt about it as I was interviewing there, but there are *some things* you just can’t do with today’s languages in order to have a purely on-demand programming language to what you need it to in a pure on-demand dev environment.
Soon, through not quite yet, we’ll be providing a lot more info about the rationale behind the language and what we intend to do with it in the future. I can’t say more than that right now, but as a web person (I like to think I am) I know we are heading down the right path. Watch this space.
Sounds great… what about if we need more than just a “Hello, World?”
Worst signup process ever. Even if they had a great service (they dont) 90% of their traffic will abandon before they get through the 11 step signup process that requires clicking on 3 TOS agreements, selecting a password more secure then my bank requires, and two email confirmations that you have to click on. WOW.. terrible…
Depends on how much it hand for non-developers.
golly – can you imagine your boss actually trying to make you use this thing? unreal.
the only way this thing could have been developed is in India. there’s like 100 man years invested in this thing already, and i suspect it’ll be another 100 before this craptacular creation can even produce a runnable Hello, world.
nonetheless – good luck – as long as i never have to use it!
As a developer, I can be convinced this could be the future. The far future. I’ll make a note of checking it out somewhere in 2025.
But seriously, I would only start to consider relying on this kind of platform if I a) can take the runtime environment and deploy it anywhere without having to rely on Bungee, and b) would have the stand-alone tools to continue development offline.
And personally, I would like all of that to be open source. The current concept makes Microsofts’ vendor lock-in practices look benign.
seems this is intended for creating, hosting, and running web applications
what about a development environment, built on top of eclipse, or something like that, that offers a traditional IDE for java/c/whatever as a service?
THAT could be useful, for collaborative programming, but i guess it would be hard to do technically
This doesn’t make a good impression on me.
When I tried to view the page right in Akregator (->Konqueror browser) I just got a note saying I should use one of their supported browsers (among them Firefox).
So I switched to Firefox. And got a blank page… I guessed it was because of JS and allowed bungeelabs.com. I got a grayed page with no reaction to any clicks, so I allowed bungeegrid.com as well, and finally it worked.
This was annoying. I suggest they at least tell their users they have to use JS to view their start page.
At least they are eating their own lunch i.e. the website (http://www.bungeeconnect.com) indicates it is powered itself by Bungee Logic. Not all companies in this space can claim that.
I have reviewed Bungee Labs as a Beta Tester, and it is a phenomenal offering. Before you criticize it, you should try it out – it is free (until you put something in production).
On the other hand, I also have a hard time yet another language: Bungee Logic. EVERYTHING should be based off OpenAjax standards. Inventing your own is just another way for vendor lock-in. I have heard all the arguments from FaceBook and Bungee of why they can not be more open, but MySpace and Google have proven it can work: just make calls to services using JSON.
(Dislaimer: I own OpenAjax.Com and Json.Com, so I may be a little biased )
Maybe Stanford will offer a Bungee Logic course next semester.
@10, Alex, if what you are saying is true, then I can see two problems at the moment. First of all, developers will be reluctant to adapt to bungee logic because they do not have the future vision of the framework as you do. Secondly, without knowing what can benefit them in the future, developers may have their projects head to wrong directions without knowing what paths they need to take to maximize the potential of this future vision.
I’ve been using Caspio Bridge for 3 years and I’ve been very happy with it.
LiquidSilver – thanks for at least being willing to discuss this topic sensibly. The the two problems you’ve outlined:
On: “reluctant to adapt to bungee logic because they do not have the future vision of the framework as you do.” – yup, we’ve got that feedback from some of our developers and it is legit concern. The challenge for us at Bungee is to provide real technical solutions to this issue. What we’d love is to let devs bring along their existing language knowledge and apply that within Bungee Connect – this isn’t a trivial CS challenge but we know it can be done. There are other avenues we’re investigating to deal with this, and really hope to share news on this soon that will remove this objection / concern entirely. The bottom line for the moment is: given what Bungee Connect lets you do that you can’t on other platforms (or at least without an *enormous* amount of heavy lifting required by the dev) is that it becomes a cost / benefit analysis for the dev: is the juice with the squeeze?…the feedback we’re getting from devs who grok the power of Bungee are telling us: yes.
On the the second issue, I’m not really sure what you mean – am happy to respond if you rephrase (sorry…I’m slow this morning…lack of sleep for me recently!).
Alex,
Why do you not support OpenAjax? Can you give a concrete example of a function that an Open Api could not solve with ’smart’ web services using JSON? I believe Bungee Connect is a great solution, but I still have a hard time seeing the reason for your own proprietary language other than vendor lock in
Ric
The website breaks the browser BACK button (everything is iframed).
FAIL.
Hi Alex, my second point was in respond to your previous post on: “Soon, through not quite yet, we’ll be providing a lot more info about the rationale behind the language and what we intend to do with it in the future. I can’t say more than that right now”
although i use asp.net, i am very tempted to use bungee logic as well. but for now, without the rationale behind bungee logic being unveiled. it would be hard for developers to measure what can be done and cannot be done with bungee logic and have a clear picture on what type of advantage bungee logic has over asp.net/php and others. hope this has clarify a bit for you.
@Ric- let’s seperate two things here – one is Bungee Logic, the programming language used by Bungee devs to develop UI behaviour / Model-View & application logic.
The other topic – the one you’re referring to is the JavaScript library sent to the broswer (called Pulse). I agree re: the general point on JSON. When we have talked with you previously (by phone) re: standardizing the js library, I believe we communicated to you our intention to reviewing Open Ajax as one of a number of options we would consider *when the time is right for Bungee Labs*. Right now, we’ve got a whole bunch of other critical items we have to nail before we commit to efforts like standards bodies and to do so the “right” way, not just as a checkbox item. So again, watch this space.
@LiquidSilver – if you sign up for a Bungee Connect, you should get a feel for why Bungee Logic is the way it is through our learning content. At the fundamental level, it is an enabler of the kind of web apps we think could and should be built for end user. (see the WideLens reference app as an example. But I acknowledge you meta-point here. Thanks for clarifying.
Squabbling over the language idiosyncrasies or how the back button breaks the site is irrelevant and petty. Frameworks, IDE’s, and languages take time to evolve. The beauty of the Bungee product isn’t in what it can do RIGHT NOW, it’s in it’s evolutionary trajectory. Imagine if Macromedia back in the day had backed down from flash, and now flex, in response the short sidedness of countless individuals contesting the evils of actionscript, or the awkwardness of the Flash 1,2 and 3 IDE.
Unlike many of the johnny come lately widget dev sights, Bungee has been in development for a while now, starting long before the rise of the widget fad. The foresight of the Bungee team is proven by the depth to which they have built out their product. It’s clearly well thought out, well built, and undoubtedly has a clever and innovative roadmap of enhancements far into the future.
This is a product and company to closely watch IMHO. I expect great things. Congrats on your launch.
Ric: what we DON’T need is yet another meaningless term like “Open AJAX”… you can’t just concatenate two buzzwords, buy the domain name, get a few companies to sign their names, make a bunch of useless “Mashup Task Forces”, and tell people EVERYTHING MUST BE DONE IN OPENAJAX!!
im in ur appz, vendor locking u to our contractz
Hey Alex, I hadn’t even realized you’d left Microsoft. Congrats…
So fair enough on wanting to build a language better suited to the on-demand development environment you’ve created. I just think that’s a tough sale for a lot of people.
For me as a dev I’ve spent years building up knowledge in my development language/environment of choice (C#/C++/.NET) and, while I don’t mind the idea of moving from VS to something like Bungee Connect, my preference would be to take as much of that knowledge with me as I can.
I half expected your language to be PHP, Ruby, or Java centric but when I saw it was something completely new visions of PowerBuilder & Delphi started dancing through me head. Knowing those two languages will never again help me as a dev. And my concern is that Learning Bungee Logic could be learning yet another PowerBuilder.
My preference would obviously be for an ASPX flavored language but if it was PHP or Java based I might be at least a little more compelled to give it a go because I know those are skills that can and probably help me out in my programming endevors beyond Bungee Connect.
Given that your target audience is developers this seems to me like it could be a very big hurdle for you guys to get over. Good luck though because I think they’re are some awesome things that are possible with this kind of approach to web development!
-steve
Hi Steve, Alex asked me to respond as I have been involved in the decision to use a new language (yes – I work at Bungee Labs
. We wanted a language that would be best suited to on-demand development and deployment. In effect, we wanted all the flexibility of a dynamic language during the development process in the cloud (that requires no compilation or linking or p-code translation for any incremental code edits and testing, etc.), but then all the power and performance of a intricately instrumented hand-crafted 3GL language like C++, C#, and Java (that can reduce down to a compiled, highly optimized format) during the deployment stage. It would be very difficult to achieve both attributes simultaneously with a traditional language offering where the emphasis is on one or the other (dynamic/interpreted VS compiled/highly optimized). While there are languages that support aspects of both, they are also less known and in many cases somewhat esoteric. Having said that, we endeavor (and are actively moving closer towards) the coding style and syntax most conducive the broadest professional developer profile possible, which we believe is the c-family language set (C#, C++, Java, etc.), so that no material language experience is lost when considering Bungee Connect as a viable platform as a service.
Re: Lock-in Concerns
Since a couple people expressed concern about Bungee Connect being a lock-in play, I’ll submit a few words that I wrote in response to this on another site.
___
Lock-in is a concern to many developers, and is a risk with many platforms. The team at Bungee Labs are well aware of the concern, and plan to take steps over both the short and long term to address the concern. Our goal is to keep developers on Bungee Connect by providing a platform that developers love to use, not by way of technology lock-ins.
Concern about lock-in generally falls in three areas: hosting choices (your place or ours), ability to export your code from Bungee Connect and run it on other systems, the openness of the Bungee Connect infrastructure. I briefly address each in a separate paragraph below.
With regard to hosting choices, we are investigating several approaches, to address three different scenarios: i) federating with third party hosting centers, giving developers a choice of providers; ii) providing dedicated managed servers at federated centers, as well as through Bungee Labs, and iii) providing a run-time version of Bungee Connect server host to allow developers to host their own applications. We have not worked out delivery timeframes for these yet, but they are definitely on our list.
Regarding code export, you can already export your application logic (pseudo-code, effectively) today. Before Bungee Connect goes from beta to general availability, we plan to refine the conventions for how code is represented within Bungee Connect, and allow you to export that code in tact.
The final topic deals in the openness of the Bungee Connect infrastructure. Bungee Connect relies upon a vast assortment of open standards and Free Software, and the team at Bungee Labs needs no convincing of the value of both. However, Bungee Connect’s most powerful capabilities are the product of inventing new software development and delivery methodologies for which standards do not yet exist. For this same reason, we have not started to open source the platform yet: we are still actively refining and optimizing the system. To open source parts of the platform before we have better refined the code–and, equally important, before there is any demand for opening it–would serve little except to have yet another start-up declaring a grandiose open source vision. To put source code out into world before that code has been properly prepared for actual use, extension, and maintenance by third-parties would be code dumping, and doesn’t serve anyone’s interest.
Please see our FAQ (http://www.bung...om/?bl_link=FAQ) for answers to many similar questions.
Ted Haeger
Director, Bungee Connect Developer Network
Bungee Labs
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