eXo Launches Cloud IDE for Amazon Elastic Beanstalk 
eXo, a provider of Java user experience and portal technologies, has launched eXo Cloud IDE for Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk. The IDE aims to allow Java devs to easily deploy and operate on a scalable platform. A beta of the eXo Cloud IDE is available as a free machine image (AMI) that can be added to an Elastic Beanstalk instance.
eXo, a provider of Java user experience and portal technologies, has launched eXo Cloud IDE for Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk. The IDE aims to allow Java devs to easily deploy and operate on a scalable platform.
The eXo Cloud IDE is an open cloud service that makes it easy for developers to access, view, edit and commit their code from any browser and deploy their applications with a single click by extending the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk runtime benefits into the development phase, according to company officials.
A beta of the eXo Cloud IDE is available as a free machine image (AMI) that can be added to an Elastic Beanstalk instance.
“We intend to make the eXo Cloud IDE a useful onramp for developers to take advantage of this new wave of Platform as a Service offerings from companies like VMWare/SpringSource, CloudBees, Google App Engine, Salesforce/Heroku and Red Hat as they release open alternatives to Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk,” said Benjamin Mestrallet, CEO and founder of eXo, in a statement.
The web-based eXo Cloud IDE can be deployed directly within a PaaS environment, so migrating from development to staging and deployment takes just a few clicks. A multi-window, extensible editor supports several file types, while familiar file system tools make it easy to move files from local sources. The eXo Cloud IDE is based on tools previously only available within eXo Platform 3, now offered standalone as a turnkey Elastic Beanstalk container. Integration with other PaaS solutions will be available soon, according to eXo’s website.
Mestrallet describe the genesis of the eXo Cloud IDE for Elastic Beanstalk to JAXenter
We have been customers of Amazon Web Services for some time now, and both our websites and intranet leverage it. Amazon's Infrastructure as a Service(IaaS) was great before, but it could be tedious to manually manage many IT processes. Elastic Beanstalk is exciting because it negates this issue entirely by automating most of the associated IT. Amazon's move was quite bold, and relatively unexpected by many players that provide Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. When I started playing around with Elastic Beanstalk, I was very impressed by it; even though it's still in beta, other Java PaaS models including App Engine, Cloudbees and VMForce have found a tough new competitor.
The eXo Cloud IDE, a standalone product updated for cloud services, is tightly integrated with the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk platform to provide an out-of-the-box container for applications that can be deployed within the IDE, according to officials. This includes mobile and social applications for platforms like Facebook, which can take advantage of the elasticity of Elastic Beanstalk.
Although the eXo Cloud IDE is independent of other eXo components, it will integrate with future cloud services that eXo will be bringing to market later this year, Mestrallet added.
The eXo Cloud IDE features a full color-coded, context sensitive and auto-complete multi-file editor with preview panel. In the future it will integrate with source control systems like Git, according to company officials. The eXo Cloud IDE, an open editor, will be available on other cloud platforms beyond Amazon and beyond Java.
The eXo Cloud IDE AMI is available for free; instructions for configuring an Elastic Beanstalk instance to utilize this custom AMI are provided in the Cloud IDE installation guide. As eXo rolls out additional releases towards general availability in Q2 2011, future AMIs will be made available.
