Full Development PaaS Characteristics
- Services to develop, test, deploy, host and maintain applications in the same integrated development environment
Different PaaS offerings provide different combinations of services to support the application development life-cycle. A comprehensive development PaaS might provide service options in an integrated development environment within the actual target delivery platform. It could include source code control, version control, user testing, roll out and roll back with the ability to audit and track who made what changes when and which task they were accomplishing.
- Web-based user-interface creation tools
Some PaaS offerings provide a level of support to ease the creation of user interfaces, either based on standards such as HTML and JavaScript or other Rich Internet Application technologies like Adobe Flex, Flash and AIR. This might allow rich, interactive, multi-user environments and scenarios can be defined, tried out by real people (non-programmers), with tools that make it easy to log/single out features that annoy or frustrate either novices or experts. Creation tools might allow interfaces to be defined for different user profiles by function or expertise.
- Support for development team collaboration
The ability to form and share code with ad-hoc or pre-defined or distributed teams could potentially enhance the productivity of PaaS offerings. In some cases, schedules, objectives, teams, action items, owners of different areas of responsibilities, roles (designers, developers, tester, QC) can be defined, updated and tracked based on access rights.
- Utility-grade instrumentation
PaaS offerings provide developers some insight into the inner workings of their applications, and the behavior of their users. Some PaaS offerings use information about user behaviour to enable pay-per-use billing. Historical usage and logs may help:
- determine whether services are of value to users/customers
- compare the value of different services
- track activity based costs and revenues
Visualization tools could show usage patterns, exposing functional or correlational relationships between:
- services and/or user interactions
- the value to the user or users
- the cost of alternative service paths such as web, mobile browser or mobile applications
Read more about this topic: Platform As A Service
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