I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S
Under the hood
Developing
Software Online
with Platform-as-a-
Service Technology
George Lawton
O
ne of the hot topics in
computer technology
is software as a ser-
vice, in which vendors
host applications on
the Internet and provide them via a
browser to users, who perform and
store their work online. Users thus
don’t have to worry about develop-
ing, hosting, updating, or maintain-
ing applications or storing data.
Several vendors have taken the SaaS
concept a big step further and now
offer platform as a service systems.
PaaS systems are generally hosted,
Web-based application-development
platforms, providing end-to-end or,
in some cases, partial environments
for developing full programs online.
They handle tasks from editing code
to debugging, deployment, runtime,
and management.
In PaaS, the system’s provider
makes most of the choices that deter-
mine how the application infrastruc-
ture operates, such as the type of OS
used, the APIs, the programming
language, and the management capa-
bilities. Users build their applica-
tions with the provider’s on-demand
tools and collaborative development
environment.
“PaaS typically provides a com-
plete set of tools and technology,
from the interface design, to pro-
cess logic, to persistence, to integra-
tion,” noted David Linthicum, CEO
of the Linthicum Group software
consultancy.
r6intr.indd 13
In some cases, developers can use
a PaaS provider’s online resources
to build applications offline.
Mostly, software developed with
the technique runs online and is
hosted by the PaaS service provider.
However, users can sometimes cache
part of a program, work with it
offline, and synchronize it later with
the online application.
Proponents say the approach has
numerous benefits such as increasing
programmer productivity, enabling
companies to build and release prod-
ucts more quickly, and reducing
development costs.
PaaS vendors include Bungee
Labs, Coghead, Etelos, Google,
LongJump, Rollbase, and Salesforce.
com. Industry observers expect more
big companies to join the fray.
However, PaaS must still address
several key concerns before it can
become widely popular.
PUSHING THE TREND
PaaS offers companies a different
approach to building applications
for internal use or for sale. Figure 1
shows a typical platform.
Published by the IEEE Computer Society June 2008 13
PaaS creates a virtual platform for
application development and deploy-
ment. The user develops applications
by interacting with the PaaS provid-
ers’ servers, generally via a browser.
The systems’ programming model
lets a developer specify business
process flow and application logic
without referring to the underly-
ing physical computer systems and
network interfaces. The model com-
piles program logic into the service
calls used by the servers, client, and
network interfaces. PaaS thus hides
the complexity of the logic running
between a client and a virtual server
across a virtualized infrastructure.
Some systems store the information
that applications work with within a
user’s infrastructure. Others store
the information online, eliminating
the need to call data from an exter-
nal source and thereby reducing data-
base-integration challenges.
PaaS vendors provide various tools
that offer different levels of precision
for letting organizations track the
usage of their PaaS-developed soft-
ware. They can track factors such
as the number of times people use
an application, the time they spend
with a program, their activities with
it, the software’s performance, and
any problems it experiences.
With some PaaS platforms, such
as Bungee Connect, developers can
build PaaS applications only when
connected to the Internet. In oth-
ers, such as the Google App Engine,
the PaaS system creates an instance
of the online server environment
locally, allowing a developer to work
offline and then push the application
to the PaaS provider’s server so that
it can host the application.
PaaS providers frequently try to
make the programming experience
familiar to developers by supporting
common languages like C, Java, and
PHP, or via drag-and-drop business-
logic tools that implement blocks of
code and thereby reduce the amount
of work required.
However, providers such as Bun-
gee and Salesforce.com have devel-
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 I N D U S T R Y T R E N D S
1 Web applications
2 Visual authoring
3 Workflow and custom logic
4 Integration layer
5 Database
6 Secure hosting infrastructure
Source: Coghead
Figure 1. Vendor Coghead’s platform is
typical of that found in PaaS systems,
which generally are hosted, Web-based
application-development platforms
that offer database, workflow, interface
design, process logic, integration,
debugging, deployment, and other
necessary services.
oped their own languages. They
say the new languages simplify the
development process and are rela-
tively easy to learn.
Advantages
By hosting the entire development
environment, proponents say, PaaS
increases productivity, lets organi-
zations release products faster, and
reduces software’s cost.
They say the approach eliminates
the need for developers to configure
their own servers for building appli-
cations, make their deployment
environments scale, and implement
and integrate management tools.
They also don’t have to wrestle with
storage subsystems, security, or OS
and server patches. And they don’t
have to deal with network interfaces
when trying to get application com-
ponents or Web services to talk to
one another. Instead, PaaS providers
handle these issues.
Developers can just focus on cre-
ating software, said Lyle Ball, Bun-
gee’s vice president of marketing.
And companies don’t have to
maintain separate environments
for tasks such as building, con-
figuring, testing, and deploying
applications, he noted. Moreover,
they don’t have to purchase and
14 Computer
r6intr.indd 14
configure separate tools for each
programmer.
All this increases efficiency,
decreases production time, and reduces
risk by simplifying the process, said
Adam Gross, vice president of devel-
oper marketing with SalesForce.com,
a provider of customer-relationship
management (CRM) services.
Building, debugging, testing, and
deploying applications in the same
environment also reduces project
risk by eliminating problems caused
when programs are developed in one
setting but run in another.
Programmers’ ability to use a
shared, high-capacity platform that
is easy to provision to additional
developers to code and test software
also enables the easy expansion of
work groups when necessary.
PaaS supports collaboration
among developers because the code
is managed online, making it easy to
access, modify, and return.
Typical PaaS projects
Linthicum said companies typi-
cally use PaaS for lightweight appli-
cation-development projects in
which there are Web-based compo-
nents and Web-delivered resources,
including information from data-
bases. An example would be a CRM
system that can be accessed and
shared by a work group.
PaaS is well-suited for these proj-
ects because it hides the complexity
of creating applications that span
Web-based clients and servers. And
the approach is better suited for
lightweight programs because run-
ning client logic within a browser, as
opposed to a native OS, is more dif-
ficult with bigger applications.
Some sophisticated PaaS applica-
tions can integrate with a company’s
existing programs that have Web
interfaces. They can also work with
other corporate software and data-
bases. The PaaS applications thus
must have a variety of connectivity
capabilities, such as SOAP, which lets
a program running in one OS com-
municate with a program running in
another OS via HTTP and XML.
APPROACHES
PaaS platforms take a variety
of approaches, from the relatively
simple, in which users basically just
assemble existing code blocks, to the
complex.
The Etelos platform (www2.
etelos.com) lets developers cre-
ate applications using the Etelos
Development Environment with
languages such as PHP, JavaSer-
ver Pages, C#, and the company’s
own English Application Script-
ing Engine. Etelos’ AOP caching
technology lets users work with
data offline and then synchronize
any changes with the appropriate
application when reconnected to
the Internet. Customers can use the
applications they build themselves
or sell them via the online Etelos
Marketplace.
Intuit, which makes the popu-
lar QuickBooks accounting soft-
ware, has released the QuickBase
PaaS system (http://quickbase.
intuit.com) in beta and expects to
start selling it in the near future.
QuickBase lets developers create
CRM and other applications that
integrate into a company’s Quick-
Books accounting workflow, said
Alex Chriss, Intuit’s group man-
ager of business development.
LongJump’s PaaS product (www.
longjump.com) has let programmers
with 118 newspapers build CRM
applications for sales, marketing,
and customer support, said company
CEO Pankaj Malviya.
Rollbase (www.rollbase.com/
platform/overview.shtml) provides
a development tool that lets people
who aren’t programmers create busi-
ness applications, including those
that connect to a firm’s back-end
data framework, said company CEO
Matt Robinson. The system includes
prebuilt software components that
users can drag and drop into appli-
cations they are building.
Bungee Labs
Bungee Labs’ Bungee Connect—
in beta with full release expected
by the end of this year—targets
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 small- to medium-sized compa-
nies, as well as departments within
larger organizations.
It includes drag-and-drop user-
interface-layout components and its
own C-based language, called Bun-
gee Logic.
The company’s platform lets users
deploy applications on servers man-
aged by Bungee or on virtual servers
running on Amazon’s Elastic Com-
pute Cloud. EC2 provides a scalable
Web services interface via which cus-
tomers can request virtual machines
on which they can load software.
Organizations can also buy Bun-
gee servers licensed to run within
their own infrastructure, which
gives them greater control and more
internal auditing capabilities, noted
Brad Hintze, Bungee’s director of
product marketing.
Salesforce.com
Salesforce.com’s Force.com PaaS
platform (www.salesforce.com/
platform) provides about 60,000
programs that users can tie together
into bigger applications. They can
also build their own applications
from scratch.
The platform provides a database
for use with applications, numer-
ous APIs, and logic capabilities, said
Salesforce.com’s Gross. Programmers
can thus concentrate on other aspects
of application development such as
the user interface, he explained.
Force.com uses a custom program-
ming language called Apex, which
focuses on database modeling.
While applications must run on
the Force.com platform, users can
back up data offline.
Google App Engine
The Google App Engine (http://
appengine.google.com) is currently
in trial release to 30,000 developers.
The platform offers scalable devel-
opment and deployment environ-
ments. Developers also have access to
Google’s BigTable database, storage,
and the same technologies for access
control, security, and Web-services
integration that the company’s own
r6intr.indd 15
applications use. The platform uses the
popular Python scripting language.
In addition, it includes an authen-
tication system to validate the iden-
tity of programmers participating in
the development process. Organiza-
tions can also utilize the system to
authenticate the users of the applica-
tions they subsequently build.
Google senior product manager
Tom Stocky said the platform focuses
on development of Web-based appli-
cations that require low-latency data
storage and retrieval.
PaaS creates an online virtual
environment for application
development.
Concerns
An organization will experience
problems if its PaaS system crashes,
if it loses an Internet connection
while working with a platform that
doesn’t permit offline application
access, or if the vendor goes out of
business, said Roger Jennings, prin-
cipal consultant with software con-
sultancy OakLeaf Systems. This is
a particular problem with mission-
critical applications.
In addition, users are locked into
the platform with which they are
working. The developed applica-
tions are set up to work only on
the platform. Thus, users have no
easy way to transfer their applica-
tion elsewhere if the provider raises
rates drastically or if the relationship
doesn’t work out for other reasons,
Jennings said.
Also, organizations might be reluc-
tant to trust critical application devel-
opment and sensitive information
within programs to either third parties
or the Internet, explained Linthicum.
And, he said, PaaS is only going to
deliver a subset of existing features and
functions most programmers look for
in a development platform, although it
will deliver enough value to be useful
for building some applications.
“[PaaS] doesn’t always deal with
integration with enterprise assets,
and many [systems] don’t provide
persistence,” he noted. Thus, if an
Internet connection goes down, the
user loses data or the application’s
current state.
“Moreover,” said Linthicum,
“the systems don’t provide heavy-
weight management or governance
services.”
Michael Coté, an analyst at Red-
Monk, a market-research firm, said
another problem for developers is
having to learn how to work with
the new platforms—particularly in
areas such as version control, proj-
ect management, auditing for gover-
nance, quality assurance, and issue
tracking—and how to use the new
languages that some PaaS vendors
have developed.
P
roponents say PaaS’s advan-
tages will make it attractive
to many organizations. How-
ever, PaaS systems will still have to
provide high-quality development
tools to succeed.
OakLeaf’s Jennings predicted that
a few large companies such as Ama-
zon, Google, and Microsoft will
dominate the PaaS market because
of their experience and resources.
However, Linthicum added, some
smaller players might succeed by
focusing on the core needs of narrow
markets, such as LongJump focus-
ing on CRM for newspapers and
Rollbase focusing on managing deal
flow for venture capitalists.
In general, though, Coté said,
PaaS will succeed only if companies
can attract large traditional organi-
zations as customers. Providers that
start with small companies may
never attract enough business to
become sustainable, he added. ■
George Lawton is a freelance technol-
ogy writer based in San Francisco.
Contact him at glawton@glawton.
com.
Editor: Lee Garber, Computer:
l.garber@computer
June 2008 15
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