Development

One step towards ZaaS (Zero as a Service)

There’s been a great deal of buzz around the Software as a Service (SaaS) topic this week. Sharon Mertz from Gartner wrote that “SaaS revenue to reach $US11.5 billion by 2011”. On the Project Zero front, we are working on a couple of ideas that we think will take us one step towards Zero as a Service (ZaaS).

The first problem we are trying to solve is to improve early experience for developers. Let me give you an example. Last weekend I was playing around with some new Zero samples and building a few of my own, when I noticed some quirks with my system. I talked to a couple teammates when I returned to work and realized that my Eclipse and Project Zero builds were back leveled. Easy enough to fix, especially with Eclipse and the Zero plug-in. This really got me thinking about how high the bar is to evaluate a new environment and run the samples.

Our India team is starting to experiment with an idea we are calling Zero Alive, which is an attempt to expose the Zero samples as a service. The idea is to let a user – without downloading Eclipse or the Zero plug-in, experiment in a sand-box with the samples and build new ones all from the ProjectZero.org web site.

Some of the key ideas behind Zero Alive are:

Workspaces – Log-on to your own samples workspace which is leased to you for some period of time. Once the lease runs out, the environment is reset – however, you can request that the lease be renewed.

Project Explorer –Explore and modify aspects of Zero’s project structure including configuration and source files. Only the most relevant aspects of the Zero project are actually viewable, giving a simplified view of the project.

Source Editing – Edit Groovy and PHP scripts within your browser

Run Samples – Run the samples in your browser and use the Zero Assembly tool to create simple mash-ups.

Debugging – Simple debugging is supported via an interactive hyper-linked log file.

There will be more… Watch this space!

- GAC