On Tuesday, I had a long telephone conversation with Lyle Ball, VP of Marketing, and Brad Hintze, Director of Product Marketing of Bungee Labs, who also gave me a Web demo of Bungee Connect. I've been on the Bungee Connect developer beta since March, so it wasn't all new to me, and we were able to skip over the basic "What is it?" questions. Instead, we did a deep dive into the development process and took a bro On Tuesday, I had a long telephone conversation with Lyle Ball, VP of Marketing, and Brad Hintze, Director of Product Marketing of Bungee Labs, who also gave me a Web demo of Bungee Connect. I’ve been on the Bungee Connect developer beta since March, so it wasn’t all new to me, and we were able to skip over the basic “What is it?” questions. Instead, we did a deep dive into the development process and took a broad look at the business model. Today I want to tell you a little about it at a high level.The elevator pitch for Platform-as-a-Service is: “A single environment delivering the entire software life-cycle as a service. Cloud-based integration creates increased productivity, open collaboration, shortened time-to-market and reduced overall costs.” What that means in practice is that you use a Web-based development environment to build, test, and deploy Web-based applications that run either on the Bungee Grid or on a self-hosted virtual appliance. The Bungee Grid has one server farm in the U.S., another in Europe, and uses Amazon EC2 to handle any loads that exceed the Grid capacity.Everything you need for the entire software lifecycle is built into the Bungee Connect Web IDE: UI, Application Logic, Debugging, Team Development, Deployment, and Maintenance. The IDE itself is a Bungee Connect application. The server programming language is somewhat similar to C#; it is currently stored as XML and interpreted, and can easily connect to XML and RESTful Web services and to PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. The server talks to the UI over the wire using optimized packets that tell the UI what to do. The UI is implemented as JavaScript controls. The whole thing performs surprisingly well on a moderately good PC as long as you have a good broadband Internet connection. In some ways, Bungee Connect is the antithesis of a Rich Internet Application. Rather than pushing most of the computation to the client, which is the way Flex, Silverlight, Curl, and Ajax work, Bungee Connect uses the client only for the display layer, but uses a beefy Grid of servers and optimized communications.What about pricing? Using Bungee Connect for development is completely free, but running deployed applications does cost money. There are two pricing models. If you run on Bungee’s Grid, the price is $0.06/user-session hour; if you run self-hosted Virtual Appliances, the price is $500/month per image. Compared to buying development tools and servers, this seems like it’ll be dirt cheap, unless your application is heavily used and wildly popular.Bungee Connect is currently in an open beta phase. Major improvements to the implementation are planned for the end of the summer, and Bungee Connect should go into general availability by the end of the year. Software Development