Cloud Computing and Hannibal Let You Be You

Recently, The Federal Government announced it will offer Cloud Computing to federal agencies through Apps.gov. As Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, recently pointed out in his blog, the move comes as a result of the realization that there is too much effort spent on managing IT infrastructure. Amazon realized this years ago and created Amazon Web Services to help alleviate this cross organizational concern.

Cloud Computing solves this problem by turning Infrastructure into a utility. By abstracting the key problems and offering a simple way to manage IT Infrastructure allows an organization to focus on the real task at hand.

We have observed the same phenomenon of duplicated effort in creating software. We have taken the philosophy of automating wherever possible to solve many common problems of creating an application. Hannibal takes care of creating the core of a web application, from persistence to presentation.

Hannibal enables you to focus on creating interesting applications instead of worrying about the common problems of creating an application. The same way Cloud Computing lets you focus on more important things besides IT Infrastructure.

Hannibal is in the Cloud!

We just pushed code generator support for Amazon's S3 key value store into Google Code. Now developers can generate data access objects that can persist data to S3. Active records are serialized to JSON then published to an S3 bucket named after your application's name. Retrieving data simply involves changing the JSON string back to an active record using the fromJson() method.

Here is what a URI path for a marathonracing's race domain object in S3 would look like

marathonracing/race/cherryblossom

where marathonracing is your S3 bucket name and race/cherryblossom is your S3 object.

Very simple.

We are testing this functionality now. Expect to see this in the next major release of Hannibal.

Hannibal S3 support

Deploying Tomcat in Amazon's cloud just got a little easier! Tomcat provides a JDBCRealm that allows developers to access user password and role information in their database. Lucid extended that concept by creating an S3Realm that allows developers to retrieve user credential and role information from S3.

Configuration of an S3Realm is easy. Just create an entry in tomcat's server.xml that identifies your application credentials bucket name, along with your AWS secret and access keys. That's it.

Of course the appropriate S3 bucket should contain the user principal and role information as well. Developers are still responsible for populating this as users register.

This functionality is undergoing testing right now and will make the next release of Hannibal! Once it does we will provide the appropriate documentation in the Wiki.