Zembly

zembly is a browser-based development environment that enables social programming of applications for Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, iPhone web applications, and other social platforms, as well as web widgets. Users of zembly interact with one another via zembly's social networking features to engage in co-development of applications for these platforms.

Zembly combines features from traditional IDEs (such as a rich scripting editor) with wiki- and social-networking-based technologies to attempt to innovate on the application development paradigm for smaller-sized applications. Applications created at zembly are automatically and transparently deployed, hosted, and scaled on its underlying cloud computing infrastructure.

Background

zembly was conceived by Todd Fast at Sun Microsystems in late 2006. The specifics of zembly have evolved with the market, but the core concepts are based on earlier ideas around using wiki technologies to describe, provision, and program against simple and lightweight web services without the barriers of traditional development tools or processes. Development of zembly as a fully funded project began in early 2007. Todd continues as principal on zembly, acting as both CTO and creative director.

Architecture

zembly is run as a product within Sun Microsystems's developer tools organization, with the hosting of the website and developer applications provided by Network.com's compute cloud. It is built on a stack consisting largely of Sun technologies, including Solaris 10, Java, the GlassFish application server, and MySQL. The software stack runs on a horizontally scaled cluster of Sun Fire T2000 ("Niagara") and X4500 ("Thumper") servers. In addition, zembly uses Apache and memcached.

External links

* [http://zembly.com zembly homepage]
* [http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/06/zembly-provides-social-context.html zembly Provides Social Context for Web Development - O'Reilly Radar]
* [http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/27/Sun-sponsors-social-apps-platform_1.html Sun sponsors social apps platform - InfoWorld]
* [http://mashable.com/2008/06/07/zembly/ Web App And Widget Engine Zembly Launches - Mashable]
* [http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/07/18/zembly-social-development-for-social-apps-100-invites Zembly: Social Development for Social Apps - 100 Invites]