Seattle-based Stax Networks launches this morning into private beta. Stax is offering a platform as a service product for Java applications - basically, the easiest way to think about it is Google App Engine for Java applications (or Heroku for Ruby on Rails applications)., Java is still extremely popular for business applications (Indeed has 64,000 Java job openings currently as well).
Stax is built on top of Amazon EC2 and allows developers to create, text and deploy Java applications without having to build out their own physical infrastructure.
For now Stax isn’t charging users at all. Eventually they’ll move to a model that charges for resources uses, similar to EC2 and other infrastructure platforms. If you want to try it out, create an account using the “techcrunch” invite code.
The company was founded by Spike Washburn, Cold Fusion creator J.J. Allaire and Baseline Ventures partner Steve Anderson. They raised a round of financing from Baseline Ventures in late 2007 - the size isn’t being disclosed but is “under $1 million.”
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If it runs on EC2 their business model should be more like RightScale. They have figured out a cool layer between the metal on EC2 and Java, however they shouldn’t stand in the way on the pricing side. Just a simple per node license for compute resources will do. That would be the easiest way to build mass adoption - predictable pricing and control IMHO.
this is an example that talkbacks are bad. anyone can simple flood you with meaningless comments. that’s why all major websites that do allow talkbacks in their articles, strictly demand you to be a registered user.
Everytime i try using that invite code.. throws exception .. whats the deal
An unexpected error occurred
query did not return a unique result: 2
query did not return a unique result: 2
org.hibernate.NonUniqueResultException: query did not return a unique result: 2
at org.hibernate.impl.AbstractQueryImpl.uniqueElement(AbstractQueryImpl.java:820)
at org.hibernate.impl.AbstractQueryImpl.uniqueResult(AbstractQueryImpl.java:811)
at com.staxnet.model.hibernate.AppQueries.getUserCandidateByInvitationCode(AppQueries.java:200)
at com.staxnet.web.controllers.WebRootControllerServlet.signup(WebRootControllerServlet.java:257)
at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor90.invoke(Unknown Source)
at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:597)
at com.staxnet.web.controllers.AbstractWebControllerServlet$ActionInvoker.invoke(AbstractWebControllerServlet.java:263)
at com.staxnet.web.controllers.AbstractWebControllerServlet.invokeAction(AbstractWebControllerServlet.java:207)
at com.staxnet.web.controllers.AbstractWebControllerServlet.service(AbstractWebControllerServlet.java:138)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:803)
at com.staxnet.web.controllers.WebRootControllerServlet.access$0(WebRootControllerServlet.java:1)
at com.staxnet.web.controllers.WebRootControllerServlet$1.execute(WebRootControllerServlet.java:65)
at com.staxnet.model.hibernate.HibernateUtil.execute(HibernateUtil.java:71)
at com.staxnet.web.controllers.WebControllerHelper.executeWebRequest(WebControllerHelper.java:179)
at com.staxnet.web.controllers.WebRootControllerServlet.service(WebRootControllerServlet.java:63)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:290)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:233)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:175)
at org.apache.catalina.authenticator.AuthenticatorBase.invoke(AuthenticatorBase.java:525)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:128)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:102)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:109)
at com.staxnet.appserver.filters.RequestMonitorValve.invoke(RequestMonitorValve.java:35)
at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:286)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:844)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.process(Http11Protocol.java:583)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$Worker.run(JIoEndpoint.java:447)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:619)
Don’t you just love these stack traces.. Oh god I miss those…
damn u scripting languages for spoiling my innocent-oop-loving programmer heart…
every time i try creating an account with the invite code.. i get thrown an exception on the page ?
cease, we fixed a glitch in that was affecting some signups, you should be able to signup now.
hi spike..
well i got in.. and got message i was over my limit for creating an application, but haven’t created anything. so i waited. now i try to login and get acegi error HTTP Status 404 - /j_security_check
ok .. disregard 404, but this is the msg..
Cannot create application
You have exceeded the maximum number of applications currently allowed for this account.
- I haven’t created anything
sorry everyone for spamming this thread
.. but finally i’m in and overall very impressive. thanks
Spike, I setup the account with no problems but upon creating the app I ran into this error:
Cannot create application
You have exceeded the maximum number of applications currently allowed for this account.
—-
Notwithstanding, I love the idea and look forward to using your service.
Stanley, You’re all set. Please drop me a line on http://developer.stax.net if you need anything else. Thanks for trying the beta.
Trying to find out how they scale the DB… if they manage to do that, it’s definitely a good option and makes the development pain tolerable.
So it’s basically a wizard for building your EC2 images?
ha ha ha hiberate!
So has J.J. Allaire left Microsoft to join Stax full time?
He left Microsoft quite a while ago, before Stax.
I tried and it works! Good job.
Question:
Is it possible to access the MySQL db from my local laptop?
OR,
Is the access is allowed to the apps running in your cloud?
Thanks.
Looks very impressive. I watched their screen casts. They appear to have created a really nice interface to an otherwise powerful but difficult to manage platform. Congrats to their whole team.
Mike, you have a typo at “Create, text, and deploy”… should probably be “…test..”
Great to see startup aggressively moving to the PaaS business model. It will be interesting to see how Stax compete against Google App Engine and Force.com to name only the big ones.
I like the idea, but boy, is this a LONG WAYS FROM PAYDIRT. I’ll check back in 3 years.
Great … Its the memory-hogging tomcat that they’re using.
Isn’t it a great thing to be a Java developer now that the clouds are made more available to them?
There was one from Morph Labs [www.mor.ph] back in May this year and now again with Stax.
Hey, Cloud - what’s next?
Best.
Alain
Wow that was short lived invitation, now I get following exception with a nice stack trace:
An unexpected error occurred
Invitation code is no longer active: techcrunch
I tried getting in a couple of times, unfortunately the exception seems to always be there. I’d love to see what they have inside though.
Why not advertise GOG as well! Groovey is like 10 times faster to code than java, if anyone is going to go through all these trouble to set wicket and struts they probably have the budget to run their own stuff. But GOG would have attracted the right audience.
seems like a useful concept. Also Groovey is not ten times faster to code than Java if you’re already a java coder and not a groovey coder.