Activestate's cloud platform for dynamic languages

ActiveState, a tool and service supplier specialising in dynamically typed programming languages, has announced the first public release of Stackato, a cloud platform for applications written in Python or Perl. The new product is based around VMware's recently open sourced Cloud Foundry PaaS (platform as a service) project. The company have made use of the open source project at cloudfoundry.org and extended it to support its commercial ActivePerl and ActivePython products.

Stackato should enable Perl and Python developers to install, manage and scale their applications in private clouds like VMware's vSphere or public clouds such as Amazon's EC2 or Rackspace's Cloud. ActiveState is not ruling out adding other dynamic languages such as PHP in future. ActiveState has made Stackato available as an early stage Developer Preview and requires interested users to register for access.

The new product's functionality includes the ability to easily port applications between a virtual machine, a vSphere cluster or a "private IaaS" (infrastructure as a service) provider. Stackato also handles the provisioning of application environments and frameworks including Django, Pylons, Mojolicious and Catalyst. The platform can also be used to identify software module and package dependencies. Available supported databases include MySQL, PostgreSQL and Redis, while Apache/mod_wsgi, Gunicorn and Nginx are among the available web servers.

Stackato also works with Node.js, a popular JavaScript development platform for server-side programs which is based on Google's V8 JavaScript engine. Applications can be deployed to the cloud either from the command line or via ActiveState's Komodo development environment.

(djwm)