Every Friday, the Caucho engineers get together to discuss the work we’ve done over the past week and to plan for the next week and beyond. As an experiment, I’m going to start a new weekly series on this blog giving a summary of our meetings. We hope you enjoy it…

Starting with version 4.0, Resin is moving in a new direction to allow users to take advantage of cloud computing infrastructure more effectively. Of course one of the first problems with “cloud computing” is the name itself. It seems like everyone has a vague (perhaps cloudy?) notion of what cloud computing is, so I did a bit of research before Friday’s meeting to make sure that we weren’t adding yet another definition to the mix. Happily, it turns out that we’re not. While the actual implementation of cloud computing infrastructure and tooling is under construction, the desire to be able to run applications transparently on a dynamically changing set of servers seems to be constant.

Our notion of cloud computing is that numerous instances of Resin will be run within virtual machines on hardware that may or may not be managed by the user. The behavior of these Resin clusters will appear to the application to be the same as if they are running on a single instance. The only thing that changes is the ability to scale as the application is running both up and down. What’s new about our approach is that it introduces distributed sessions, caching, and application deployment for web applications.

One of the other topics that came up at our meeting was Quercus Personal. Whenever we go to tradeshows or talk about Quercus, inevitably people want to run the compiled version for personal or hobby projects, but the full professional version of Resin is a bit out of their price range or they don’t really need clustering features. To address this market, we’re planning Quercus Personal which is exactly like Resin Open Source, except that Quercus compilation is available to speed up PHP. The price point is much lower since enterprise clustering is not included. Our goal is to make this version of Quercus just as easy as installing a LAMP stack or nginx/PHP.

Finally we talked about my work on the Eclipse plugin for Resin. This plugin is based on the Eclipse Webtools generic server functionality. We’ve got a basic version working with the standard .war deployment, but I recently made some modifications to allow running a web app directly from the Eclipse project directory. Resin 4.0 now allows deploying a web app dynamically across the cluster, so we also added a way to access that functionality directly from Eclipse. There are still a few places where we need to add UI elements to make this more natural within the Webtools framework, but the basic operation is now available. Of course, we’ll also be documenting the plugin and making it available for installation from directly within Eclipse.