eWeek has just posted an article about SitePen: SitePen: Passing the Open-Source Torch
Open-source participation helps SitePen amass an all-star team of Web developers.
SitePen is full of fantastic people, really. It’s a great example of a business built on the success of open source project leadership and contribution.
Alex Russell picked out a few great highlights from the new Dojo 1.1 release and has a nice little essay on open source to boot:
I could go on for a long, long time about what’s great in Dojo 1.1…but I’ll spare you most of that. James, Pete, Dylan, and the release notes can give you a strong sense of why Dojo 1.1 is the most polished, fastest, and easiest-to-use release of Dojo we’ve ever done. For the impatient, you can already start using it from the CDN without downloading anything.
[From Continuing Intermittent Incoherency » Dojo 1.1: Some Awesome For You App]
Dojo is reaping the rewards of having spent a lot of time getting their infrastructure together. 1.1 really improves so many parts of the package.
(ObDisclaimer: I’m not directly involved in the Dojo project myself, but I work directly with core Dojo folks at SitePen.)
I don’t know if this preannouncement comes as a result of all of the Google App Engine publicity, but here it is: Amazon Web Services Blog: Storage Space, The Final Frontier. In a nutshell: AWS now lets you create a storage volume of 1GB to 1TB that can be mounted in one EC2 instance and will persist beyond the lifetime of an EC2 instance. As an added bonus, you can have automatic snapshots of your volume plunked into S3.
They say that this storage is a low-latency, high-throughput block device. So, you can run all kinds of traditional software on top of it.
This will change the competitive outlook a bit between AWS and GAE a bit, because it makes it easier for people to use all of the software pieces that they’re used to when they use AWS to manage the hardware infrastructure. This means that it’s easier to take your existing apps and skills and get them up on AWS. GAE has a fight ahead in terms of getting people to write their apps differently… but the benefit to doing so is that you no longer think of hardware infrastructure at all.