I received my invitation to the Stax beta today, and was a little too keen to get my hands dirty.

I gave myself a quick 15 minutes to write a simple weather application, and deploy it to the Stax Cloud (I had already created my application and downloaded a local development version via the Stax SDK). In short, Stax is a breeze to use and I think it will become a very compelling platform in the future.

The Stax Cloud allows you to easily deploy web applications straight to Amazon EC2. You can deploy many popular Java based technologies including ColdFusion and Flex.

It’s the first platform I’ve seen allowing you to deploy the Adobe ColdFusion application server to the cloud. Other than Stax, I’ve only heard of Railo being deployed to Amazon EC2 because of all the licensing problems with Adobe ColdFusion. I still haven’t investigated how Stax are overcoming the licensing issues (that’s on my todo list).

You can visit my weather application, and I managed to get it done within 15 minutes.

I really like the Stax Cloud. It makes it so simple to get an application up and running, which essentially is an Amazon EC2 instance. I’ll definitely keep playing around with this technology.