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:
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….
richardsandwell 