If you haven't tried this then you should. Everyone is going to cloud these days :) You will find several options for this such as Amazon's cloud etc but I choose VMware's Cloud Foundry because its free for now and is easy to integrate with STS (SpringSource Tool Suite) or Eclipse, so why not try it on. In this example I am using STS. For advance info check out http://blog.cloudfoundry.com/
Here are the steps to get started:
- Signup yourself at cloud foundry signup (This step takes about three weeks to complete) Once you are registered then you will have a userid/passwd to logon into your a/c.
- If you don't have STS then download here.
- Integrate STS with Cloud Foundry Extension by opening up STS-->Help-->Dashboard and then going to Extensions tab. Search for Cloud Foundry and install it.
- Add a New Server in STS and select VMware--> Cloud Foundry
- Now supply your login credentials here which you received from step 1 and validate account.
- Almost done! This is how your server will look like. Now just add any web project to it and enjoy the benefits of cloud.
- After adding the project to "VMware Cloud Foundry" you can connect and start the app. Check out the url http://amitonjava.cloudfoundry.com/ Download the source here AmitOnJava.zip by clicking "File-> Download Original" (Note: you have to rename the project from AmitOnJava to something else because by deploying to cloud amitonjava.cloudfoundry.com is already taken)
Off-course this is a very dumb app as it is just printing a text message but the whole point is we can now deploy and share the app with the world really fast. Check out some of the professionally done apps http://vaadin.cloudfoundry.com/, http://infinigram.cloudfoundry.com etc. or you can also download various sample applications @ https://github.com/SpringSource/cloudfoundry-samples.git
The next thing I want to do now is develop a REST based API and deploy it in cloudfoundry for reference.
