[javajosh]

My take: Bowery is basically Google App Engine for Node.js.

Of course, they put their own spin on things. The whole 'bowery connect' thing is unusual - they say that your "dev environment is online" but I'm not sure what they mean. It appears that what 'bowery connect' does is initialize a git repository and starts sync'ing filesystem changes to a remote host. In other words, rather than GAE's more traditional "deploy" command, bowery is constantly deploying.

The benefit of doing deploy in this way is clear: it's much easier on the user (nothing to install apart from an editor), and it's much easier on the bowery people because they don't have to provide a local analogue to the hosted environment. The dev environment is the hosted environment. This is possible because, presumably, the hosted environment serves branch URLs extremely cheaply.

No doubt the kernel of this project has it's origin in a late night conversation that started, "What if HTTP endpoints were as cheap as git branches? What if you had an active endpoint for every branch?"

[dbyrd]

"What if HTTP endpoints were as cheap as git branches? What if you had an active endpoint for every branch?"

I really like that

[tingletech]

Another group in my office has been doing this for a long time, except with hg. They have it set up so that whenever you push a branch to dev, there is a [branchname].dev.[propertyname].org. You push to the master branch on the production machine, and then that is what is running the production site.