Having spent the last year in private beta, Bungee Labs is now opening its hosted, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) composite app development environment wide open. And as part of the public beta, it’s showing off an online calendaring application as its own equivalent of the old Java Pet Store reference.

There’s little new about Bungee’s announcement, except that if you weren’t one of the several thousand that caught its debut at the Web 2.0 Expo last year, you can now get access to the beta. At this point, Bungee is shooting for end of year or so to actually get to formal general availability, which means, the point at which they say (1) it’s OK for enterprise-critical apps and (2) they’ll have a billing mechanism for their run time charging model.

February 19, 2008

Having spent the last year in private beta, Bungee Labs is now opening its hosted, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) composite app development environment wide open. And as part of the public beta, it’s showing off an online calendaring application as its own equivalent of the old Java Pet Store reference.

There’s little new about Bungee’s announcement, except that if you weren’t one of the several thousand that caught its debut at the Web 2.0 Expo last year, you can now get access to the beta. At this point, Bungee is shooting for end of year or so to actually get to formal general availability, which means, the point at which they say (1) it’s OK for enterprise-critical apps and (2) they’ll have a billing mechanism for their run time charging model.

The reference application around calendaring, called WideLens, is pretty cool. On your Bungee WideLens calendar, you can also federate data from external calendars including Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, Salesforce (which offers calendaring as part of its contact management functionality), and Google calendar. While the calendar integrates listings form each source, the display is simply a web services call to the source calendar; unlike earlier client/server offerings like Lotus Notes, no data is replicated. The only data persisted locally is the data you enter personally on WideLens, which like Zimbra’s calendar/email offering, is store in a MySQL database.

Unlike Zimbra (now part of Yahoo), Bungee is not offering WideLens as a calendar per se, and lacks the email function. Its purpose in life is to provide a reference application, with the source code mad publicly available, so you can both use it and get an idea of how you can use the Bungee environment.

Bungee is one of a new generation of hosted offerings promoting Rapid Enterprise Composition, which provides an application composition environment that provides the kind of protected environment that first-generation ISPs like AOL provided to consumer web surfers. In this case, it’s a sandbox where developers or business analysts can romp where enterprise policies regarding who can develop or gain access to applications is strictly guarded.

Bungee differs from Serena and Coghead in that it’s aimed at developers, not business analysts. Like Salesforce Apex, Bungee is counting on being able to get developers to learn a new development language that is supposedly contemporary with Java or C#.

But given Bungee’s focus on developers, what’s lacking is the lifecycle aspect of it. That is, they will provide development and testing tools (while deployment, being on the same multi-tenanted environment, is strictly closed loop), but none of the governance type things like the source code control that Serena places around its enterprise mashup environment, or the agile-like planning tools that folks like Rally or the open source Eclipse Myelin provides.

At this point, Bungee’s offering is available for anybody to, literally, play with.

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