April 17, 2007

This week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco is bringing out a spate of announcements that you can now combine the ease of 4GL rapid-application style (RAD) development without the pain of learning languages or deploying the necessary tooling.

One of them, Bungee Labs, is announcing its existence this week.

Bunjee offers a fully on-demand environment for the full life cycle of developing, testing, version controlling, and deploying an app. It supports use via three major browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and (Apple) Safari. Its language, Bungee Logic, is declarative, making it higher level than programming languages like C# or Java, or scripting languages like PHP.

“We’re introducing the SaaS model to software development and deployment,” explained Lyle Ball, vice president of marketing. In essence, it is taking a broader, but for now shallower, message than providers such as Rally, who offer agile software planning in an on demand environment; and CollabNet, which offers its Subversion source code control (check in/check out) also on an on-demand basis.

It will let you develop rich web apps using Ajax-style programming for clients and REST-style programming for data access. You can interactively apply Ajax controls to server side data types within web pages and forms, apply Bungee’s test harness to regression test your apps, use Bungee’s check-in/check out for version control, and then deploy one or multiple versions of the app out to the web site, with rules that dictate which classes of users get access to which versions.

And it will allow you to connect with web services, either from your own internal systems or from external sources including Amazon’s e-commerce and simple storage services; eBay’s web services; Google’s AdWords and Maps; Microsoft Windows Live search and MapPoint; PayPal’s web services; RealNetworks’ Rhapsody; Salesforce.com’s Apex programming language; and Yahoo’s Flickr and Yahoo!Mail services.

Bungee’s development environment is entirely intended to be a black box. Neither .NET nor Java, it has its own proprietary back end language called Bungee Logic, which is based largely on a C#-like language and uses an IDE that should look familiar to C# or Java developers. It’s aimed more at those who use popular web scripting languages such as PHP or Ruby.

For now, Bungee is only announcing its existence and will open early access in May. It will announce a full beta later in May and expects a 1.0 version before year’s end.

The Bungee folks are saying, you could have it all. Develop with our simple tool, which is offered in a hosted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment, test it, and deploy it there as well. Because it’s Web 2.0, you can develop rich clients, and because it’s the web, it is available through a browser on somebody else’s infrastructure.

Bungee isn't alone in hopping the Web 2.0 ease of use bandwagon, but compared to other recent offerings like Coghead, it is aiming more at professional developers to drive its point home.

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