Java, Ruby and SaaS

When corporate IT builds an application, you assume that the program will run in the company's data center. Well, you know what they say about assumptions, and especially in these days of software-as-a-service.

Certainly David Abramowski, CEO of Morph Labs Inc. based in Cebu, Philippines, is betting the old assumptions about where IT's homegrown code run are history. This week his company announced a beta program to let IT (or an ISV) deploy Java-based applications in Morph Labs' data center in California in a SaaS model.

Morph Labs already targets ISV apps built using Ruby on Rails, but chose Java because that's the language of choice for IT. Abramowski says, the company did so "because of a demand we see in medium and large enterprises to outsource Web infrastructure." In part, he says, that's because "corporate data centers are full and they're out of power."

Morph Labs doesn't just host your app. You hand over your bits and its tech staff does everything else-from creating data base tables to backing up your data on a daily basis. It has designed specific Web app infrastructure to guarantee uptime and performance. Its "high performance grid cluster" software coordinates the processing of all the apps in a given cluster.

Abramowski claims Morph Labs is doing exactly what Google is with its App Engine program-with one big difference. According to Abramowski, Google uses proprietary technology, such as its own APIs and data store, to "lock in developers.". He says, "We've done this before. It's called Windows."

By contrast, Morph Labs depends on open source tools, such as Postgres and, next month, MySQL databases, the Jetty Web server, the Mongrel app server and other freely available software.

The Java app service leaves beta in June. Developers can get a free account on Morph Labs. Full-blown SaaS deployments start at $1 per day. (Yes, that's one buck.)