Dick Hirsch introduced me to Stax in relation to an open source project that I’m involved with, Apache ESME (more on that later)
 

  

What is Stax ?

According to the Stax website … Stax is “The fastest way for developers to build, manage and scale Java applications on EC2″ .. here are the notable features ….

Application Templates

Once you’ve installed the Stax command line tools its a breeze to get started with building your application. Stax comes with various pre-configured application templates to get you started .. the most notable for me among the templates was the Flex/BlazeDS template that can be created as follows ..

$ stax create -t flex myflexapp

The -t in the command line tells stax to
generate using the flex template

Check out the 2 minute guide to create and deploy a Flex/BlazeDS Hello World app that uses remoting .. it really did take 2 minutes.

Stax also has application templates for Struts, Wicket, JSP, Jython, JRuby (on Rails) and ColdFusion
 

No proprietary APIs

Stax does not make you use any proprietary API, so your application code is totally independent of the environment and you can choose to move to a different deployment environment whenever you like.
 

Simulated local development environment

The Stax command line tool has a run command that lets you run/test you application locally during development using a local pre-configured instance of tomcat.

$ stax run

And when you’re done developing just say ..

$ stax deploy -u staxusername -p staxpassword

 

Snapshots and Roll-Back

Stax lets you create snapshots of applications or databases so you can revert to previous snapshots at any time. Every time you hit the deploy command a snapshot is created and you can revert to it anytime.

 

Reporting and Monitoring

Stax also has real time reporting to monitor your application’s health, resource utilization and performance

 

All the Elastic Cloud goodness

And last but certainly not the least Stax lets you leverage all the Elastic Cloud goodness offered by Amazon EC2 .. scale on demand, clustered servers for load balancing, pay for only what you use etc.

Stax is currently in closed beta and they’ve not announced their pricing, but its definitely worth a look the next time you’re starting a new project.