Bungee Labs and platform as a service: a great RIA

Tonight Bungee Labs is launching a new version of their "platform as a service" offering and it's pretty impressive. BungeeConnect is an on demand application development platform in which the IDE resides entirely in the browser. You build your applications in the browser and then have the ability to publish what you create and pay for it on a demand basis. The more popular your application, the more you'll pay. So much like Amazon's S3 or EC2 you can leverage the Bungee back-end to power your web application.

What's unique about Bungee is that everything happens inside their environment, hence the term platform as a service. Instead of having to pull development, storage and deployment from various services, everything (plus more) is contained right within Bungee. So you get everything; a development environment, the ability to debug, the ability to test, the mechanisms to publish, and storage capacity that scales as your application requires it.

BungeeConnect has been around a little while and I've played with it a bit and was pretty impressed with the IDE. One of the more important aspects of this announcement in my mind is that they've created a very powerful calendaring application that brings together services like Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar into one very powerful Ajax application that was built using BungeeConnect. That application is going to be open sourced so that any developer can take a look at how it was built and take ideas/code to use in their own Bungee Connect creations.

I'd love to see Bungee as an AIR application or with any kind of offline support. I think the IDE is very much breaking the barriers of "desktop software versus browser software" and it would be very cool to be able to leverage the Bungee IDE from anywhere and then continue to use the rest of the Bungee infrastructure to test and deploy applications. They've built up a very solid offering for everyone from teams to individual developers.

One of my favorite anecdotes was a story about a Bungee employee who got an emergency phone call and had to make changes to the underlying code-base (all built with the Bungee application). He was shopping at Best Buy at the time and was able to go over to a connected computer, log in, and make the required changes then publish them to the production server. That's one of the powerful things about BungeeConnect: it's development wherever you need to do it.

More info:
TechCrunch
ReadWriteWeb