Pypelyne Blog

When I wanted to build something to help people manage their product pipelines — which is embodied in Pypelyne — I had to figure out how I could build this without a deep commitment in time and money to infrastructure and development. This is not an area I had a lot of experience in or wanted to spend a lot of time on. But, using a variety of hosted technologies and cloud-based solutions allowed me to put together a cohesive and compelling product in a matter of a couple of weeks.

When I started down this path, there wasn’t a single place I could find that had all the information I needed to get going. I thought I would share my experience so others could take advantage of it and comment on what’s worked for them.

Cloud Infrastructure

When you typically read about cloud computing, the primary references are the Elastic Computing Cloud from Amazon Web Services. Solutions like AWS and Microsoft’s Azure platform were too low level for what I needed to get started. I didn’t need a solution where I just got the raw horsepower and bandwidth on demand upon which I could decide which operating system and database I wanted to run. I didn’t want to think about things that level. I wanted something where I could immediately start designing and building my product — quickly.

Platform as a Service:

Initially I considered building the product completely in a single environment using a Platform As A Service (PaaS) solution. I felt that if I could get one environment where I could deploy the database, the logic, and the front-end, I could speed things up a lot. I looked at solutions like Coghead, RollBase, LongJump, BungeeConnect, and force.com.

Some of them — like RollBase and LongJump — had an inherent CRM bias and what that meant was that although you could extend the platform to support your own applications, you had to adopt, to some degree at least, their processes, workflows and account model.

Others that were more of a real platform like BungeeConnect and force.com had a steep learning curve — if you really want to create a finely crafted experience, you have to get deep into the guts of the platform and that meant learning a lot. I spent a long weekend taking lessons on BungeeConnect’s learning center and eventually gave up. The real problem was that the only source to learn about BungeeConnect was BungeeConnect. There were no outside resources if the BungeeConnect documentation and tutorials fell short, which they did. With force.com I had a different problem: there was no clear directed path to get up to speed with the framework. You got tossed into the deep end and had to figure it out. I went pretty far using Coghead, which was quite easy to comprehend but not very flexible, but then they went bust before I really do anything with it.

Database as a Service

For a number of reasons I decided that I wanted to build the bulk of my application in Flex. With that decision, what I realized is that I didn’t really need a middle tier (at least for the prototype.) I just needed a hosted database that my Flex application could talk to. The ActionScript could do what I’d need PHP or Java or ColdFusion to handle.

I looked at Amazon’s SimpleDB, Zoho Creator, Intuit’s QuickBase, and We Are Mammoth’s X2O Framework. While I spent quite a bit of time using Zoho Creator, I found the constant translation to and from XML to be cumbersome. It felt like a lot of work to get my data in and out the database. Zoho tries to be very flexible and it is. I just wanted something narrower but easier to get up and running with.

Both QuickBase and X2O allowed you to access the the database as ActionScript libraries which made integration really easy. After reading X2O’s documentation, I was able to get my first test application running within 30 minutes. The QuickBase solution, on the other hand, just didn’t have enough directed documentation to get you up and running. It took a lot longer to get something to work.

X2O’s solution is remarkable because you can set up your data and their relationships without knowing a bit of SQL and you get all these ways to get at the data automatically. When I needed to do more complex stuff, I could write custom SQL queries that then got exposed as ActionScript classes and methods. Their web-based Content Management System allowed me to manage my data via an admin interface from anywhere. That was nice — I didn’t have to write any admin tools.

With the Flash front-end and a hosted database, I had a working product! It was all sort of amazing to get that working cleanly and quickly. Now I just needed to host the application.

Hosting

I hosted my product at MediaTemple. I liked their GridServer offering that would allow me to scale when I needed to and the up-front costs were small. But what I liked a lot was that they offered other hosted solutions like a content management system (Django) and a mySQL database container. I didn’t need it right away, but I felt I might later. They also offered me a hosted WordPress blog, which this blog is hosted on.

Other Cloud Services

It felt like I was done with most of what I needed so I could start exercising the product. But as I thought about some of the other things I needed and started wiring them up I was struck by how many of these were just cloud-based services and, even more remarkably, most of them are free. These are some of things I’ve ended up using.

• I use Gmail for managing emails.
• Google Analytics provides me with click stream insights on the website, on my blog, and also within my application.
• When I want to collect information from a user, I use Wufoo’s amazing forms. I just include them in the web pages I want like this one. You can analyze the data collected in these forms and you can also set up alerts and workflow when data is submitted.
• Adobe InContext helps me create, edit, and publish my HTML content.
• Any files I use on my local machine are in a DropBox folder. I get backup and versioning. It don’t need some fancy source control system. This works great for me. I can access my files from anywhere which means I can make quick fixes and edits at any time.
• And because I’m paraniod, I also use Carbonite as a second layer of backup.
• A widget hosted on AddThis encourages users of Hexhelion to tell their friends about the product. ShareThis can do the same thing.
• When I want to make videos of Hexhelion, I use a cloud based screen recording tool called ScreenToaster.
• YouTube hosts the videos that are streamed into the application, my blog, or the help pages.
• Survey Monkey lets me poll my users.
• After I wrote the help pages for the site, I needed a way for people to search the pages. I used Google Site Search. Even more interesting cloud based solutions exists specifically for help and customer service like QueryBot, myKB, PicoSearch, and ExtremeEase. I tried all of these out and, of them, ExtremeEase gives you the most flexibility for rich help content creation and searching. PicoSearch comes in second. QueryBot and myKB are more of an automated answering system and were less interesting to me.
• I have a lot of screen-shots in the help pages. FotoFlexer helps me edit them. This means I don’t need to buy or install Photoshop.
• Google Docs helps me keep track of expenses.
• Although I am not yet monetizing my product, I know that when I do I would use a cloud-based billing platform like Zuora. Through a simple set of API’s Zuora allows you to set up subscription services for your customers.
• I don’t need to deal with phone support yet, but when I do I can use something like RingCentral. This is a call distribution on the cloud and I can buy an 800 number than can forward calls to me. It’s much more sophisticated than that and can be used by mid-sized call centers.

Practically everyone of these services, which live on the cloud and I’ve integrated with, are themselves build out of other components that live on the cloud. For example, X2O is hosted on the cloud using AWS. And thus the cloud ecosystem proliferates.

What’s remarkable is that it has become so easy to bring to life an idea or a venture using these hosted solution components. It’s cheap. It’s quick. And it’s really efficient.

I hope this helps you get your ideas off the ground and to market quickly. Let me know if you have questions or comments.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 12:05 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.