JumpBox Launches: Easily Deploy Self-Contained Webapps at sablog.com

JumpBox Launches: Easily Deploy Self-Contained Webapps

Written by Shanti A. Braford November 18th, 2006in Industry News, Phoenix.

JumpBox, a local Phoenix-area startup, just launched this week. It was founded by two Phoenix entrepreneurs — Sean Tierney and Kimbro Staken.

I was quite impressed when Kimbro & Sean demo’d the app at Refresh Phoenix the other week.

If you have a web application that a customer or client needs to have onsite, JumpBox could be your answer.

It lets you build a server from scratch - say a default Fedora Core 4 Linux OS with Apache/MySQL/PHP installed and preconfigured to your specifications. You then load your application software and custom configurations onto the server.

Next, using JumpBox tools (which I understand are still undergoing refinement) - you basically make a clone stamp of that entire OS disk image.

You can then deploy that disk image to any server that supports Xen Virtualization. The image can be hosted at a data center, onsite, remotely, etc.

The trend lately has been for hosted webapps to host of all your data on their servers and make it available via API, etc. (Basecamp, Google Docs, Mailroom, etc)

I can see JumpBox shining for deployment of those applications that are notorious for their dependency hell and nightmarish setup complications. (*cough* Trac)

Simple Subversion, Trac & Other Open-source Team Tools
I would love to see a JumpBox stack that featured:

Subversion
Trac
CruiseControl or some other continuous integration tools

Slightly OT: until it gets easier to setup a Subversion/Trac/etc. stack (perhaps via JumpBox), I would highly recommend checking out Unfuddle. (especially if you just love the simplicity and headache reduction, generally speaking, of hosted webapps)

They are a fully-hosted service (featuring liberal amounts of AJAX and built in Ruby on Rails) that can power your Subversion, Ticket / Bug Tracking, and Project Milestones needs.

More at JumpBox.com.

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cosmos

One Response to “JumpBox Launches: Easily Deploy Self-Contained Webapps”

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1 Sean Tierney on Nov 18th, 2006 at 6:26 pm

Shanti,
thanks for the mention! 2 clarifications-
1. the JumpBox appliances will run on Xen as you say but they also work on Parallels and VMware GSX server so you’re not locked into a particular virtualization technology.
2. you are correct that we create a complete disk image that is fully self-contained but it’s slightly more than a straight disk image- they’re true “virtual appliances” in the sense that they have the ability to update themselves to the latest version of the application code and handle other issues such as licensing and simplified network configuration. This is a subtle yet important difference that is being debated right now mostly surrounding the so-called “appliances” listed in VMware’s VMTN library. Most are simply base install disk images of a specific software running on a specific OS. The JumpBox magic is in the underlying plumbing that we’ve built to take care of the licensing, install and maintenance issues so the appliance can be a blackbox that just works.

Strangely enough, the developer appliance you request was the original inspiration for creating the JumpBox platform itself. Kimbro had a consulting project for a major hotel chain and ended up spending a few days setting up the necessary development infrastructure and thought it would neat to develop a hardware appliance that bundled the elements you suggest plus bug tracking etc. in a hardware appliance. With research into virtualization we ended up ditching the hardware aspect and going entirely virtual with it.

Glad you enjoyed the demo. Grab a copy of the vTiger example appliance off our site if you are curious about checking out the guts of how it works. And if you know any investors you think would dig this opportunity - hook it up

Sean