Bungee offers hosted software development

Boasting of a one-of-a-kind solution for the application development lifecycle, Bungee Labs is launching the public beta Tuesday of Bungee Connect, an on-demand platform for Web application development and deployment.

Featured is a full gamut of tools and services to build and host applications. "Bungee Connect is a single platform for the development, testing, deployment, and hosting of rich Web applications," said Lyle Ball, Bungee Labs' vice president of marketing.

With the platform, developers can collaborate to build Web applications leveraging multiple Web services and databases. Applications are deployed on Bungee Labs' multi-tenant grid infrastructure and can be SaaS-based or offered as stand-alone Web destinations. They are accessed via popular browsers.

Rather than developers having to assemble disparate pieces such as IDE, an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) toolkit, and testing and collaboration tools, Bungee provides all these capabilities.

"Developers log onto Bungee Connect. It's in the cloud and it's a hosted environment," Ball said.

Bungee describes its product as a platform-as-a-service system, in which the entire software development lifecycle can be supported on the same computing environment to reduce costs, risks, and time to market. 

Because Bungee Connect is entirely based on-demand, users can build and deploy applications without installing or configuring servers and can connect to multiple Web services from within a single environment, said Brad Hintze, Bungee director of product marketing.

"I think it's got some very interesting benefits because it's managing to integrate development and deployment but in a service environment, so it allows for a developer to [have] access to tools," said Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. "It also at the same time gives them a place to deploy their applications without having to worry," about run-time choices and operational issues," he said.

Bungee also provides a way to mash up with other Web services, Gardner said. Bungee is "on to something" that is a harbinger of things to come in creating a seamless relationship between development and deployment, he said.

As part of its launch, Bungee is offering reference applications, including a calendar application, WideLens, which integrates Microsoft Exchange, Salesforce.com, Google Calendar, and other sources. These applications serve as examples of integration offered on Bungee Connect; source code for the applications can be imported into any Bungee Connect account, modified, and used in commercial endeavors.

AJAX-enabled applications can be built and embedded within other Web applications, in SaaS solutions, or offered as a stand-alone Web destination.

Interactivity is delivered via AJAX but developers themselves do not write any AJAX. They use the Bungee Logic programming language for building application logic while the UI is built using a drag-and-drop metaphor. Bungee Logic features a C-style syntax and acts like Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform, Hintze said.

"We automate AJAX interactivity," while developers focus on creating applications and value, Ball said.

Development, collaboration and test deployment are free of charge on Bungee Connect; developers only pay when applications are used. Through a utility-based pricing model, businesses can expect to pay between $2 to $5 per user per month for a heavily used business productivity application or fractions of a cent per e-commerce transaction.

Bungee's grid infrastructure provides data on application usage patterns. Applications are hosted free during the Bungee Connect Public Beta program. The public beta program is expected to continue until the end of 2008, whereupon Bungee would launch the general release of its service.

"And [then] the world is a different place," Ball said. Some 40 developers worked to deliver Bungee Connect, according to Bungee Labs.