The subject of hosting an XApp came up, recently, in both the Morfik forums and the MorfikDev community forum. This is a very interesting subject which I think merits some consideration.
Morfik uses native binary compilation for its server side components. This makes it an ideal tool for creating lightweight and fast server side processes but it also makes it quite shared-hosting unfriendly. This is a very important fact for when you are designing your commercial roadmap for a business using Morfik.
If you need to have shared-host compatibility, you should be looking at creating purely browser applications with Morfik, where you can benefit from its visual designer and compiler technology and using other popular tools, such as PHP, for the server side programming. Morfik browser applications can be deployed through any server an can issue XMLHTTPRequests against any server.
When you decide to write your entire application using Morfik you need, in fact, to be ready to make, in fact, a commitment to a higher cost deployment environment where you will need to have at least a virtual private server. This kind of solution isn't very expensive these days, but anywhere near the $7 to $10 per month for which you can find shared-host solutions.
Morfik Technologies itself has been developing a special shared-host deployment environment for Morfik XApps, for some time now. A recent post in one of the Morfik forums containing a general roadmap for the near future details that this service should come online sometime in the second half of the year. I guess we'll have to wait and see this service works and performs to know if there is finally a low-cost way of deploying simple Morfik applications.
Labels: Hosting
From the recently unveiled Morfik website we can already see one of the new directions in which the company is moving: hosting.
The Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 IDE sports a Deploy button on its Ribbon toolbar and on clicking on it a dialog pops up asking for several parameters, including a domain name. The suggested domain name: morfikspace.com is a nice hint, but the new company website goes as far as setting prices for different hosting plans.
In a quick chat, Morfik's Shahram Besharati told me that the hosting service is undergoing testing and will be available to the public in the near future, but no date has been set yet.