September 27, 2013: This Week at Engine Yard

Well, this week was pretty exciting on the announcement front for our team. The extremely awesome Richard Watson flew over from Ireland to announce our launch of Java at Oracle’s JavaOne conference this week, and there’s been a fair amount of press buzz and excitement around that. If you are interested in gaining early access as we gear up to release Java on our platform, check out our Java page and sign up for early access! We will also send you a questionnaire about what you’d like in your optimal Java stack to help us prioritize development.

–Tasha Drew, Product Manager

Engineering Updates Troubleshooting is hard, and in certain cases of attempting to debug what’s going on with your application master that is causing it to be promoted, you want that master to be around to poke at even after the promotion behavior has occurred. In response to a customer request for exactly this behavior, we’ve released a feature into limited access (meaning you need to open a ticket and ask our support team to enable it for you) that adds a new option. You can now choose a new behavior upon application master takeover – either to delete the old application master (which was the existing behavior), or to detach it and have it become a utility instance so you can use it to debug whatever issue you are experiencing.

Once you have the feature enabled, you will see a new select box just below the existing application slave takeover configuration section on the environment edit page. Then, once you’ve enabled the feature, an environment where the application master has been detached and is now a utility will look like this:

If this sounds like something you’ve been looking for, have our Support team enable it for you, try it out, and let us know how it goes in our early access feedback forums!! Any and all feedback is gratefully received.

Social Calendar (Come say hi!)

Friday, October 4th - Sunday, October 6th: Globetrotters Kevin and Slava are off again, this time to PHPNW in Manchester!

Friday, October 4th: Our chief PANDA herder Sal Cardello will be attending Web Afternoon Atlanta. Tickets are sold out, but you can join the waitlist here.

Articles of Interest

Shawn Anderson “Kicks the tires in Ruby 2.1 preview,” and lets us know how it goes. Best practices in JavaScript are rethought by Pete Hunt in his presentation about React!

Have you met Cedric? He’s a computer built entirely out of carbon nanotubes that has just been revealed by researchers in California.