iPhone developer Jonathan Zdziarski presented, and gave a brief history of the iPhone Open Source Tool Chain. I found his comparison to the official Apple SDK interesting -- he positioned the Open Source Tool Chain as the platform of choice for people who want to develop free and open source iPhone applications (of course), and the Apple SDK as being for "enterprise developers."

While I agree that the Apple SDK will be used by enterprise developers, I think that a lot of non-enterprise developers will find it attractive as well. Anyone who wants to take advantage of the iTunes store distribution channel, as well as possibly charge some money for their application will want to opt for the official SDK. I also wonder how many mainstream iPhone users will really be willing to jailbreak their iPhones in order to run applications, once the iTunes store is up and running with lots of applications.

At any rate, it is great to see Jonathan and the open source community making so much progress on the iPhone platform. Regardless of whether you choose to install applications developed from the Open Source Tool Chain, I think it will only serve to put pressure on Apple to make the official SDK even better, and I hope, to open up access to more capabilities. It is great to have a choice between two SDK platforms.

Thanks to the Mobile Monday folks for putting on a great event.

Update: other blog posts here, here, and here.

My iPhone was picked up by FedEx in Shenzhen, China, followed by a short hop over to Lantau Island, Hong Kong. From there, a long flight to Anchorage, Alaska, another flight to Newark, New Jersey, and then to Wilmington, Massachusetts. Finally, it's a short delivery truck drive to my office in Bedford, Massachusetts.

It's very impressive that through this combination of Apple's order fulfillment capabilities and FedEx's worldwide delivery system, this little box makes it from a factory in China to my hands in only three days (one of which was a Sunday). I think that this is the first order I've ever placed from Apple's web store, but I can't imagine that this is the most cost-effective way for Apple to fulfill all U.S. orders. I imagine that ideally, Apple bulk ships stock from China to warehouses in the United States, and then ships to individual customers from there. Surely direct shipment from China to a U.S. customer is reserved for situations where the U.S. warehouses can't keep up with demand.

A simple REST interface lets you store and retrieve attribute-value pairs in the cloud. While Amazon S3 is ideal for storing large files (e.g. photos, videos, audio files), you could use SimpleDB to store all the data your web application needs to run. A SimpleDB attribute could also be a pointer to a file in S3. What a great way to provide persistent storage for a web application without having to use SQL or worry about schemas.

More interesting details here, and here.

Over on my photoblog, I'm posting some photos from a photowalk Boston's Back Bay neighborhood, starting today. (Click on the photo on this page to see the entire gallery before I post it.)

First of all, it's incredibly easy to fire up an instance, log in, and play around with your virtual Linux box. At that point, you can login as root, create users, install software -- anything you want, it's your box. Some of the pre-built packages supplied by Amazon come with Apache and MySQL preloaded. This is a great way to fire up a development or test box whenever you need one -- at only $0.10 per hour.

The economics of EC2 for use as a production server (that needs to be running all the time) depend on what you need. If you're looking for something that will compete with a typical low-end shared hosting account, this isn't it. An EC2 instance will cost you about $72/month plus bandwidth and storage costs. This is, however, an exciting alternative to traditional virtual or dedicated hosting.

A couple things still need to be worked out. First, an EC2 instance has no persistent storage. When your instance dies or is rebooted, all its associated disk and memory die with it. There will be some ways around this. I'm sure Amazon has something in the works, and many other folks are also experimenting with (the obvious solution of) making Amazon S3 mountable as a drive, for unlimited persistent storage. Second, your IP address lasts only as long as your instance. You'll get a new IP address each time you boot. And currently there is no way provided by Amazon to map your domain name to your EC2 instance. You can either stick with the domain name provided by Amazon, or use an external DNS mapping service to point to your server.

Considering that EC2 is new (and barely in beta yet), these limitations don't matter. A lot of people are going to be building a lot of exciting things with EC2. As someone else said somewhere, Amazon is building the real Web 2.0.

Q: What operating system environments are supported?

Amazon EC2 currently supports Linux-based systems environments. Amazon EC2 currently uses a virtualization technology which only works with Linux environments. We are looking for ways to expand it to other platforms in future releases.

Q: How is this service different than a plain hosting service?

Traditional hosting services generally provide a pre-configured resource for a fixed amount of time and at a predetermined cost. Amazon EC2 differs fundamentally in the flexibility, control and significant cost savings it offers developers, allowing them to treat Amazon EC2 as their own personal data center with the benefit of Amazon.com's robust infrastructure.

This opens up a number of exciting possibilities. I'm already wondering if I can use this to replace my traditional web hosting provider; the scalability could be quite compelling (not sure yet about the economics). I'll have to do some more reading of the docs to find out more.

Update: Techcrunch now has some commentary on this as well (not sure what makes it "exclusive").

Update 2: More from me.

Accompanying the article is a photo of Schwartz in front of a Sun sign somewhere on one of Sun's campuses. It's notable because it shows the original version of the current Sun logo -- before someone had the idea to turn it on its corner. I've always thought that Sun has the best company logo in the computer industry.

Scott has always been a larger than life figure, for Sun employees and outside observers alike. Most notable over the years have been his somewhat over-the-top attacks on arch-rivals Bill gates and Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. Whether you agree with Scott or not, he has long been one of the more entertaining leaders in the computer industry. It will be interesting to see how much we hear from Scott in his new role, and in the future if/when he moves on to new opportunities.