Question: Would you put money into a project that’s completely tied to a single PaaS provider?

Answer:

(A) No, not until there’s a way of migrating between PaaS providers.

(B) Yes, because I’m an idiot.

Anyone for open standards?

Lock-in is a concern to many developers, and is a risk with many platforms. The team at Bungee Labs are well aware of the concern, and plan to take steps over both the short and long term to address the concern. Our goal is to keep developers on Bungee Connect by providing a platform that developers love to use, not by way of technology lock-ins.

Concern about lock-in generally falls in three areas: hosting choices (your place or ours), ability to export your code from Bungee Connect and run it on other systems, the openness of the Bungee Connect infrastructure. I briefly address each in a separate paragraph below.

With regard to hosting choices, we are investigating several approaches, to address three different scenarios: i) federating with third party hosting centers, giving developers a choice of providers; ii) providing dedicated managed servers at federated centers, as well as through Bungee Labs, and iii) providing a run-time version of Bungee Connect server host to allow developers to host their own applications. We have not worked out delivery timeframes for these yet, but they are definitely on our list.

Regarding code export, you can already export your application logic (pseudo-code, effectively) today. Before Bungee Connect goes from beta to general availability, we plan to refine the conventions for how code is represented within Bungee Connect, and allow you to export that code in tact.

The final topic deals in the openness of the Bungee Connect infrastructure. Bungee Connect relies upon a vast assortment of open standards and Free Software, and the team at Bungee Labs needs no convincing of the value of both. However, Bungee Connect's most powerful capabilities are the product of inventing new software development and delivery methodologies for which standards do not yet exist. For this same reason, we have not started to open source the platform yet: we are still actively refining and optimizing the system. To open source parts of the platform before we have better refined the code--and, equally important, before there is any demand for opening it--would serve little except to have yet another start-up declaring a grandiose open source vision. To put source code out into world before that code has been properly prepared for actual use, extension, and maintenance by third-parties would be code dumping, and doesn’t serve anyone’s interest.

Please see our FAQ (http://www.bungeeconnect.com/?bl_link=FAQ) for answers to many similar questions.

Ted Haeger

Director, Bungee Connect Developer Network

Bungee Labs

http://reverendted.bungeelabs.com