Test site

You might have noticed beautiful blue button to the right with the inscription “Test site”. If you venture to click on it, web page http://web-appz.hp.af.cm/ will open in the new tab. In it you'll see this:

                           Node.js testing site for web-appz.blogspot.com

I agree, it's not much. To be honest it is less than “not much”, but it is a beginning. Behind the page is this illustrious code:

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'});
res.end('Node.js testing site for <a href="http://web-appz.blogspot.com">web-appz.blogspot.com</a>');
}).listen(process.env.VMC_APP_PORT || 1337, null);

The experience with appfog was so satisfactory that I think it would be fair to share it.

AppFog

https://www.appfog.com/ is where the test site is hosted. I went there, I clicked “Sign Up” and was redirected to their sign-up page. Since they are presently enhancing their automated sign-up process I sent an e-mail to their support team, and presto, in less then 15 minutes my account was created and ready to use. Needles to say, I opted for a free account and this is what I bought for that kind of money:

Detailed pricing could be found on https://www.appfog.com/pricing. Later I shall opt for some other plan, but for the beginning it is more that I hoped for.

Once my account was open I started creating my first application. There is a point-and-click interface to jump-start the process. First, you choose app or framework from 14 available ones at the moment (including node.js, Drupal and Ruby on Rails just to name a few). Second, you choose infrastructure. I chose HP. And third, you choose the sub-domain name. My obvious choice was web-appz. Then the system created application skeleton for me. And, just between you and me , that is the code listed above. I did tweak it a little to replace “Hello World” with a link to this blog, but that was all. Also, there is a command-line tool that works nice and you need to install it in order to interact with your application.

So, my start was not as difficult as I thought it would be. On the other hand, the application is far from a serious example I want it to be, but I hope to expand it soon.