Hot application deployment – now that is cool !!
Early development environments did a reasonably OK job in ensuring that the programmer does not have to face a long wait between making a change to their program and seeing the result. When a single vendor controlled the complete development environment, it was possible to do so and the expectation was reasonable.
This continued even after the browser evolved as the standard front-end, because every environment has a “Server Pages” model (ASP, JSP, etc.) – that kept things under their control. Then, as they always do – things changed.
Demands on user experience were increasing, front-ends were getting fatter by day, and JavaScript was getting more and more attention. One day, things snapped and front-end and back-end technologies went their separate ways. Super specialization ensued and no single provider could claim control on the complete environment. Things moved so quickly that it was difficult to keep it all together. The developer community had to invent a new specialization – that of DevOps. More on that, another time.
As a side-effect of all this, the “build-compile-run” cycle took a major hit. After the (back-end) developer makes a change and saves it, it could be minutes before the IDE readies the server and makes it available again. And how often do developers do that – a lot!
Zoapi uses hot-deployment technology. This means that when you make a change to a module and deploy it, it compiles only that module and deploys it on the running web-server. When the deployment completes, further calls to the API automatically point to the new code. The running services see no interruption at all.
Hot deployment is not a new concept but I haven’t seen it used in modern day frameworks. Perhaps they tried, but it was just not possible in the complex new-world.
When you change a service in ZOAPI and deploy, it takes only a few seconds for it to become live.
Author: Manoj Agarwal, Chief Architect – ZOAPI.
Do not forget to visit the website: https://zoapiio.com.
