Ep3: Companies Who Make Money: JumpBox
Story bySteven Carrol
Steven is a web applications developer, living in south of France, originally from London. His current project is Myplaylist.biz. In the nin(show all)Steven is a web applications developer, living in south of France, originally from London. His current project isMyplaylist.biz. In the nineties, he was a designer / director of a highly successful design, manufacturing and distribution company (Intimidation).
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Dropbox should have used a Jumpbox!
NowJumpboxmay have been the ideal solution to the lame Internet connection problem. Jumpbox is a little startup who are actually making money! But explaining what they do is also a little scary. In a nut shell they make open source applications run in virtual environments, and one of their products is a virtual LAMP stack. Now for the English version.
Imagine your a small group of developers and you want to build an app in an isolated test environment, but don’t necessarily want to go through the pain of setting up a Linux distribution for your LAMP or Rails app (believe me, you don’t) or going even further the Linux distribution then some other open source software. So instead you simply install virtualization software such asVMwareorParallelsthen you install your Jumpbox LAMP distribution. It’s a 1, 2, 3 process and you’re all done.
So in the above nightmare scenario, you could bring your ‘Mac’ intending to demo on that and realize once you get there that their Internet connection was unstable or even that their A/V setup for whatever reason for whatever reason requires that you have to run it on their PC.
So you just download the free VMware player, put your LAMP or Rails JumpBox containing your app on a USB stick and move it to their system. Then you have an isolated and movable application which is stable. You can also clone it and give a complete copy to the guy running the projector while you’re still futzing with your copy. Heck you could give all your audience members a demo to take away on CD if you really wanted to.
Here is a quick demo of Jumpbox to get some idea of it’s power:
Such a simple solution has obviously found a wounded market place who are gravitating to Jumpboxes to help them set up a whole host of open source applications (ready out of the box) and for developers it’s almost a dream come true and a nightmare avoided!
