OpenShift is Amazing.
I've been working with Java for 7 years. I've never developed anything that wasn't either work or a university project, and I've certainly never developed anything that I published for the work to see. That has changed.
I didn't know how far hosting had come. I figured for a couple of dollars a month I could probably get access to a Unix server somewhere, where I could host a little Tomcat instance and throw a pre-compiled WAR file at it. What I didn't realise is that there are hosting solutions out there that are *deeply* integrated into my existing development environment.
So I write a pretty basic Java web app on my computer. I use Spring MVC to simplify the mechanics around my presentation tier. I use a Maven POM file to define my dependency on Spring's JARs. I version control this with git.
With OpenShift, it will create a new Git repository for me, and when I add my existing code to this repo, and push it to the OpenShift server, it will compile, build, package (including pulling in all my Maven dependencies) and deploy this for me. For free. With literally no effort on my part.
I actually feel a little cheated, there's a small amount of joy in doing these tasks yourself, but I can't argue that this is a huge step forward for the amateur Java developer. I really don't need to understand the details of any of the stack apart from the actual application development. No more messing around with build tools, no more server deployment issues.
Right now my first 'public' application - CarMatch - is simply a welcome page. But to update this to a fully-featured web-application would take me as long as it takes to push the Git-managed repository to the server, and however it takes to build and deploy.
Plenty of how-tos, guides and details on my plans for CarMatch are on their way, but this gushing first post seemed somewhat appropriate given the amount of freedom OpenShift has given me to publish my code with the minimum of overhead.
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