Programming for PaaS

Chapter 2. What Is PaaS?

Developers are migrating to PaaS to get their jobs done faster and better.

Faster: because you spend less time setting up and managing servers, or waiting for someone else to do it.

Better: because PaaS lets you implement best practices without thinking about it.

Developers all have their own unique sets of considerations and challenges. Before writing this book, I myself had challenges rooted in a childhood web success that turned into what would have been a crushing failure had I not learned some critical lessons that strongly influence how I write code today.

Conjuring a Website

In 1996, my family signed up for an Internet connection and received a shared hosting account tied to our Internet Service Provider. I downloaded Fetch, a free FTP client, and found a Webmonkey tutorial that taught me the basics of HTML. I entered my FTP credentials and was on my way. When I fully realized anyone in the world could see my Hello World web app, I was hooked. A simple “hello” transformed the rest of my life.

I love magic. I find it fascinating how you can prepare for days or even weeks, practicing detailed finger work for a trick that can last a few seconds. I wanted to combine my passion for doing magic tricks with my passion for this new toy called the Web. So I created my first web page, a page for magicians to exchange ideas and tricks. It started out as a simple HTML page and quickly grew into a dynamic PHP website that I called The Conjuring Cabaret.

As the community ...