Vaadin Interactive Turtle v1

So - Amazon cloud services didn't work out so well for me. Was unpleasantly surprised to see a bill for about $18 show up in my inbox after only a few days of playing about with their service. I hadn't even gotten to actually deploying any code at all, and was still getting hit with nearly $20 in charges. Turns out they will start charging you for total run time of any instances, regardless of whether they are doing anything, or hosting anything. Guess I'd been spoiled by previous experiences where these platform services only billed for actual processing time, or would simply gate-keep you to limit the available resources, or a combination thereof. So, I've gone back to trying CloudBees, which is where I'm currently hosting my sample code. Has been working fine so far, but I'm running a Vaadin app, which is completely server-side, and CloudBees only gives you 128MB RAM for their free app instances. Guess I'll see how long it takes for Vaadin to blow out that restriction.

Here my turtle:

http://vaadonis.lci.cloudbees.net/

Back in the saddle again

I want to thank FlashDan aka Vaadan for pointing out the lovely services available via Blogspot and Amazon's EC2 / Elastic Beanstalk. He's helped me find new motivation to get back into the blogging / demo scene.

I'm looking at using Blogspot to host these blog entries. If all goes well, I'll be hosting some example applications on the Amazon infrastructure. Currently, my primary focus has been with Vaadin for Java-based front-end development. Beyond Java solutions, I'm also hoping to spend some time looking at Javascript in the front end as well as some interesting Node.js solutions. Of those, meteor.js definitely looks like it may hold some features and capabilities of interest.