cloudsmith beta...finally

Beta day! Cloudsmith moves to public beta today, after almost 12 months of development.

The primary change is the removal of the technical clutter that made it hard to understand Cloudsmith.

Now, there are really just a few things you need to know. In fact, I can sum up the current Cloudsmith service in just five bullets.

1. The map holds distros and components. Components are the parts. Distros are parts combined into finished products.

2. Cloudsmith distros are "virtual." This means the map doesn't actually contain the components that make up the distro. It just knows what they are and how to find them. Virtual distros get "materialized" rather than just downloaded. When you request a distro, Cloudsmith tracks down all the parts, gets them downloaded and then puts them together on your local machine.

3. You can create a distro out of any components in the map. If you'd like to use components that aren't in the map, you can add them by mapping the repository in which they're found.

4. You can publish distros, or map components, into private publishing spaces to keep them private. You can share a private distro by inviting others to share the private publishing space.

5. You can create a Cloudlink to any distro in the map. This is an ordinary web link you can embed in a blog, email, etc. When someone clicks on the link, the distro materializes out of the cloud. Like magic.

That pretty much covers it.

So, what don't we like about the current beta? First, we need to improve usability and navigation for the underlying simplicity to show through. We'll be focusing on this over the next few weeks.

Second, site quality needs to improve. There are performance glitches and bugs in the JBoss JEE/Ajax stack we're using for which we need to find workarounds. And we would be surprised if there weren't more of the same in our own code. The only way to surface them at this point is to expose the site to a wider range of user behavior, and the best way to do that is to open up the site.