So, now it is settled, I want to stay inside the corporate firewall, but I want each application isolated from the next, and by the way, there is no budget for any of this. I posted about three PaaS providers a while back, and started thinking that what I really needed was PaaS, but I needed to be able to host the PaaS environment inside a corporate LAN. Off to search the web. Surprisingly, there were not just a ton of viable results in that search. Even more surprising...hard to find one with a "download here" button. No matter how I searched though, one company & product kept popping up: Stackato by ActiveState. The words "Free Micro Cloud" were a very encouraging sign. So let's take this thing for a spin and see just how easy it is...

He walks you through the installation process - downloading the VMs, setting up the initial configuration and how to use the command line tool to deploy your own applications (several come preconfigured though). He also includes an example configuration (YAML) you can use to configure custom applications and some sample code showing a database connection.

One of the biggest obstacles when getting started with Xdebug was that I had a hard time finding good instructions on how to set it up on Mac OS X (I finally got rid of windows, yeah !). The only good resource I found was stored in Googles cache (wasn't live anymore) and had instructions on how to manually build xdebug from source.

His is a four step process of installing XDebug support on his MAMP setup - including a few configuration directives you'll need to apply to get XDebug support included.

ActiveState is pleased to announce the creation of the Open Komodo Project, a new initiative to create an open source platform and promote open standards. The Open Komodo Project will support the open web and web standards, fill a need for developer tools in the open web technology stack, and drive further innovation for Komodo IDE and Komodo Edit.

They want to create a framework for development that integrates with other software (like Firefox) and makes development of both simple applications and complex, rich applications simple. Check out the full press release for more information or just head straight to the project's homepage to get started.