CloudFoundry PaaS Test Drive

I checked out today the recently announced VMWare SpringSource PaaS, I'll have to admit that my first experience went pretty well, from 0 to up & running in the cloud in less than 15 min total (excluding download time from maven for some dependencies, your mileage may vary :), this is amazingly RAD!!. I used the vmc client instead of the STS plug-in, I needed an app to deploy so I used Roo (which also has a plugin) to generate the PetClinic app from sample script file that ships with it, below are my foot-steps, follow along if you happen to be checking it out too:

# install ruby, below is the ubuntu distro way, use pkg installer accordingly
sudo apt‐get install ruby‐full
sudo apt‐get install rubygems
sudo install gem vmc
# either add to $PATH on .bashrc or just create quickly an alias as below
alias vmc='/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/vmc'
# once installed then launch vmc then with a target cloud + login
vmc target api.cloudfoundry.com
vmc login
> enter email and password, you can use 'vmc passwd' to reset given temp password
> roo
script /samples/clinic.roo
perform package
exit
cd yourRooProjRoot/target/petclinic-0.1.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT
vmc push
# accept all defaults and give a unique name

https://petclinicroo.cloudfoundry.com And below are some useful vmc app commands you can run afterwards:

• vmc -h
• vmc apps
• vmc stats petclinicroo
• vmc logs petclinicroo
• vmc instances petclinicroo
• vmc logout

I found the vmc client very straightforward to use. Though this is a very plain app test drive, what's important to identify here is (which I found better than other solutions):

Support for some JVM languages

Data storage SQL + NoSQL support [MySQL,MongoDB,Redis], more to come

Open paradigm, no lock in, public, private and cross infrastructure

PaaS is becoming the imminent sweet-spot for application developers, and VMware has stepped up the game in the future of the cloud. Update: 08/10/2011, here's a PoC js data grid doing CRUD ops (some features not implemented) invoking RESTful service using provisioned MongoDB for persistence and Spring profiles
https://restgrid.cloudfoundry.com (System.getenv("VCAP_APPLICATION") != null) ? "Cloud" : "Local" )

public class CloudApplicationContextInitializer implements
              ApplicationContextInitializer<ConfigurableApplicationContext> {
@Override
public void initialize(ConfigurableApplicationContext applicationContext) {
  CloudEnvironment env = new CloudEnvironment();
    if (env.getInstanceInfo() != null) {
      applicationContext.getEnvironment().setActiveProfiles("cloud");
    } else {
      applicationContext.getEnvironment().setActiveProfiles("dev");
    }
  }
}

<mongo:db-factory id="mongoDbFactory"
 dbname="#{serviceProperties['mongodb-db.db']}"
 host="#{serviceProperties['mongodb-db.hostname']}"
 port="#{serviceProperties['mongodb-db.port']}"
 username="#{serviceProperties['mongodb-db.username']}"
 password="#{serviceProperties['mongodb-db.password']}"
/>             

<bean id="mongoTemplate" class="org.springframework.data.document.mongodb.MongoTemplate">
<constructor-arg name="mongoDbFactory" ref="mongoDbFactory"/>
</bean>

<beans profile="dev">
<util:properties id="serviceProperties">
<prop key="mongodb-db.db">db</prop>
<prop key="mongodb-db.hostname">127.0.0.1</prop>
<prop key="mongodb-db.port">27017</prop>
<prop key="mongodb-db.username">xxx</prop>
<prop key="mongodb-db.password">xxx</prop>
</util:properties>
</beans>

<beans profile="cloud">
<cloud:service-properties id="serviceProperties"/>
</beans>

$ vmc apps
+--------------+----+---------+-------------------------------+------------+
| Application  | #  | Health  | URLS                          | Services   |
+--------------+----+---------+-------------------------------+------------+
| petclinicroo | 1  | RUNNING | petclinicroo.cloudfoundry.com |            |
| restgrid     | 1  | RUNNING | restgrid.cloudfoundry.com     | mongodb-db |
+--------------+----+---------+-------------------------------+------------+
$ vmc services
============== System Services ==============
+----------+---------+-------------------------------+
| Service  | Version | Description                   |
+----------+---------+-------------------------------+
| mongodb  | 1.8     | MongoDB NoSQL store           |
| mysql    | 5.1     | MySQL database service        |
| rabbitmq | 2.4     | RabbitMQ messaging service    |
| redis    | 2.2     | Redis key-value store service |
+----------+---------+-------------------------------+
=========== Provisioned Services ============
+------------+---------+
| Name       | Service |
+------------+---------+
| mongodb-db | mongodb |
+------------+---------+

Update 09/2011 I'd like to share a project (that recently deployed to the cloud) from post which plots in a graph histogram for given datasets (you can select multiple rows to view combined results)
https://rest-stats.cloudfoundry.com
And the respective System.getProperties() + System.getenv() could be seen here Cheers