Technology | richardsandwell

Apologies to Jay Kay for nicking one of his song titles. I needed to build a virtual linux box to run Joomla so that I could get up to speed with it. The last time I had anything to do with this, it was called Mambo, and wasn’t half bad as a CMS.

So I settled down with a copy of ubuntu (I’d like to say I have a favourite linux distro but it strikes me as like joining a club that likes only yellow cars – linux is linux, really) and installed it together with xampp and after a few hours I had my Joomla server up and running. Nothing wrong there – a perfectly acceptable overhead, a morning’s work – but it wasn’t until I started trawling the net for some Joomla templates to modify that I came across these people:

Jumpbox

They do pre-configured virtual machines, with the software that you need to run on top of it already loaded. So, in effect, you can download a Joomla appliance that you fire up in vmware and configure, and then you are good to go. Excuse me while I flagellate myself for using an american-ism there, I meant “Ready to go”, of course. 5 minutes – compare and contrast that with the effort and configuration to get my linux VM up and running.

Some of these appliances are free to download – Joomla, sugarCRM, Drupal and TikiWiki, others, like OrangeHRM and WordPress are available on a subscription basis. What is interesting is that you have an option to launch software in the cloud, so assuming you have an Amazon EC2 account, you can launch the software on a PAYG basis. Which is very very cool. So if you need to architect solutions using a bunch of discrete boxes, this is a very quick and interesting way of putting together rough sandboxes.

Yes yes, the usual disclaimers apply, I’m not employed by these people, nor do I recommend them in any professional capacity. It just struck me as a useful weapon to have around to save time if you have to build environments….

Ever since I was introduced to computers and computing in nineteen-something, it seemed that the natural scheme of things was to do things in a proprietary way and to pitch your products against a competitor’s. DEC and IBM, Unix and DOS, Atari and Amiga….the list goes on – I’m sure you can add Wordperfect and Displaywrite 4 to the list if you were a pedant. (And yes, I know that is an IBM System/36 above, before you start. I wonder if the plant had an RPG II device name?).

Today though, there doesn’t seem to be the polarisation that I have always come to expect from the market. OK, I use OS X (why do Mac users always feel the need to tell everyone in their posts?), but that doesn’t mean I use one for any other reason than I want to. I’ve found that there is very little I need Windows for (domino designer springs to mind, but that is a dying art) – rather, I can achieve the same levels of productivity on anything nowadays as long as it has a standards compliant browser. And so where is that fight nowadays? It isn’t hardware – that has been commoditised to the point where you can pick up a laptop with your shopping at Tesco – it isn’t OS based, or even software based – no one cares if you use office 2007 or openoffice any more. No, I think it is in the SaaS (Software as a Service) arena – a phenomenal growth area. But there are two very obvious omissions – no Apple or Microsoft offerings appear in this marketplace….the behemoths appear to have been wrong-footed again.

In my current role at #insert_current_employer I was looking for a decent document repository that wasn’t box.net based. I needed something similar to the old domino teamroom style of ‘project spaces’. I happened across www.glasscubes.com and i was quite blown away with the elegant simplicity of it. It has a three user free trial, and it does seem to be robust and elegant and I like that. And it is SaaS based and you pay per bum-on-seat and, and, and,well – I am quite excited by it. Give it a go, and then tell the owner what you like and don’t like about it. SaaS is quite the place to be at the moment, and I can hear another 1999/2000 dotcom bubble being inflated as armies of VCs eye up the revenue streams geneated by these startups. Lest you think it is an advert for glasscubes, I am also taken with liquidplanner.com/ – this is another corker. Well worth a look and has an interesting pedigree.

Er, I thought I was supposed to be a tired cynical old IT hack? I almost sounded enthusiastic about something for a minute there….

Virtual Insanity

Saas