Deploy Grails into the Cloud with Morph AppSpace
Morph Labs is a cloud-based platform for hosting web applications. Under the covers it runs Amazon EC2 and wraps around it all the required infrastructure to reliably deploy, scale and manage web applications in the cloud. Morph AppSpace has happily been hosting Ruby on Rails apps for sometime now. However, in June 2008, Morph Labs extended its offering to the Java Community by supporting Grails. Now Java developers can focus upon building web applications and all the hassle of deployment and managing hosting environments to Morph AppSpace.
So why is this important? Well, I always fall off the edge of the cliff after I've built and packaged the damned Java web application into my trusty war. Where do you host the damned thing? Traditionally, I would have to invest the time and effort to find a hosting provider, setup the server, the database, install Java, and so on. I hated that. What a waste of time. All I wanted was a script to take my war file and hand me back a URL to where it is now running. That, my friends, is what Morph AppSpace is offering. As well as the management, reporting and other stuff you need to monitor once the web site goes live.
If you go to Morph Labs today you can get yourself a FREE developer account and in a few minutes have your web application live on the web. Given that you guys are pretty busy, I'll save you the time. What follows are all the steps I took to get a pre-packaged Grails web application live on the Morph AppSpace platform.
Morph App for Grails: Baby Steps
If you're new to Grails, it'll take you no more than 4 minutes and 41 seconds to create you own Grails app. Once you have that, you're good to go. Read on:
Step 1: Signup for a the account (https://panel.mor.ph/signup)
Step 2: You're sent an email to activate the account
Step 3: The email will take you to http://panel.mor.ph/subscriptions
Step 4: Here create you New Morph AppSpace subscription. You can choose between application types Ruby on Rails and Java. Also, with support for MySql, there is now an alternative the default database PostgresSQL.
Step 5: View your initial new website.
Step 6: The watch the demonstration demo which is a link off your application panel
Follow the instructions and now view your running Grails web app. Here's my simple app on http://javasoup.morphexchange.com
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