A few words about Mor.ph

    In a recent discussion of the Google App Engine (GAE) and Java on this habratopic, good people suggested looking at Mor.ph

    looked, looked delicious at first glance - but in the course of real use I found out a few but. We’ll talk about them.



    So, first about the tasty. Morph, among other things (PHP, Ruby, I omit it here) offers hosting for Java applications. Unlike VPS - there is no ssh, server settings and other things - everything is already configured. It is only necessary to configure the web application to use certain JNDIs for connecting to the database and mail / Session, select the database (MySQL or PostgreSQL to choose from - I got bribed by postgres), plug it in with a special tool (attached) - and everything will start working.

    Everything works on the nth number of server instances (Jetty-7.0 is installed) on top of which is load-balanser. The number of instances depends on the tariff. Well, all this stuff lives on Amazonian services.

    From the goodies:
    1. Ease of server management
    2. The ability to dynamically switch between tariffs (easily switch to a more powerful expensive if required) - pay by day
    3. Availability of a free tariff with 3 GB of traffic per month and 1 gig of development space
    4. Minimum a paid tariff gives 30 gig of traffic and costs 1 bucks a day (I was comfortable)

    What BUT it turned out:
    1. you can’t park your domain on a free tariff
    2. working with the database only through phpPgAdmin - for example, I had to migrate the existing database - you can upload there only through the SQL upload. For my not-so-large export database, SQL was 2 Giga. Download 2 Giga ... well, it’s a trite traffic pity
    3. Java is configured to use 196Mb of memory (as far as I understand -Xmx196m) - not all applications will have enough (in the forum a person complained that Alfresco could not start) - my EmForge is also not a fact that it will go. Moreover, this setting does not depend on the tariff - you can buy a bunch of "cubes" - instances - but each will have Jetty with 196 meters
    4. You can only see the last 200 lines of the log (which is clearly not enough) - they promised to fix it
    5. Jetty - 7.0-Beta. In my case, the combination of JSF 1.2 + Facelets + RichFaces produced "Cannot restore View" when composing forms. I have not tested my application for compatibility with Jetty 7.0 (I will have to try playing locally) - but IMHO to put the beta version was a hasty decision on their part Generally

    - the planned migration to Mor.ph is being canceled so far :(

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