I think you missed the point of Jonathan's article as well. It wasn't even about COBOL. The point is that innovation needs to happen all the way around, not just in languages. The industries that still make use of COBOL are stuck in the 50's, and the language is just a small part of that issue.
You kinda have to agree that writing anything in Java isn't exactly... "fast". That said, I don't use Java for "quick answers" -- if I want something that super easy and needed tomorrow, I'll do it in Ruby (especially if I know that it's not going to need to scale massively or get tons a hits and requests).
I'll be honest, though I have my issues with Java, I've been following along with James Gosling as he's transitioned through different projects and I have to agree with one thing that I think really differentiates Java from newer languages--when you really need to scale in orders of magnitude (like Twitter), then Java is beast. It doesn't make it easy, but then again, the solution to difficult and large problems wasn't going to be easy to begin with.
Thanks, Colin. Should have done that to start with. I really liked Michael's post and thought it could use some new visibility--which is why I wanted my blogs readers to see it (mostly Java guys).
If someone could find me some scientific data on usage (I've been working on this for a while with other languages) I would love it. Seems we will always be stuck with "non-scientific," volunteered information.
To your first question: we actually don't own datacenters. We partner with reputable hosters within each country that we go into so that there is already a well known and established company with great infrastructure in place. So, for example, if you US Jelastic in the US, your actual data would be on the Jelastic platform with Servint (our US partner). All of our partners have incredible uptime (Servint has something like 7 9's after their 99.9% uptime) and service.
As far as engineers and such, we are on both sides of the globe, US and Eastern EU, so that we can cover all times zones well.
Not sure about adding a support phone number. I've always had bad experiences when providing that as another option for support, especially in today's hyper connect world. We find that most our users (>12k) prefer the forums, support tickets and Twitter and Facebook.
I do like your idea for a messaging system. I've actually been considering Olarq. I'll most definitely make sure that we talk about this. :)
At the end of this month, we will have the pricing on the site. Our blog post on pricing was about us launching commercially at the end of this month. At that time, we will publish pricing on our page.
We are something of an international company. We have offices in the US and Ukraine. Our funding comes from Runa Capital, which is Russian. I am based in Houston, TX. :)
I think you are looking at this from the wrong perspective. The idea is that you only pay for what you use. 2 dedicated servers means you always pay for the whole thing, plus you have to be the sys admin and a few other things. Jelastic eliminates that layer and it only charges you for what you actually use. I doubt you need to dedicated servers full time to run an app. The idea behind automated scaling is that you eliminate the costs associated with hosting. I come from a hosting background and this is a HUGE cost saving measure. Even if you get a sys admin for super cheap (Eastern EU or a BRIC country), it would still be cheaper to use Jelastic. All that said, another issue with mirrored, dedicated servers would be the issue of one going down: with Jelastic you won't have that issue.
Sorry that wasn't clear. The way it works is pricing is the same for database and app servers, i.e. per cloudlet. HDD is free for the first 1GB. After that, there will be a monthly fee for storage that we have yet to announce. (it will be in line with what storage is currently running in the market)
Part of what makes it so cool is that there is literally no learning curve. It's a pretty straightforward UI. We made that part of our goal when developing that platform: not having to relearn stuff to just deploy your app, like Amazon or Google.
As of now, while in Beta, it's totally free--and has been for about 5mo. That said, we are working on getting a free tier. Doing free as a startup when you have to have infrastructure on the backend is a little difficult.