Earlier this week Brad pointed me to a sight called Jumpbox.com.  Jumpbox allows you to download pre built packages for many of the popular open source applications like Alfresco, Bugzilla, and Joomla just to name a few.  Here is their one sentence description “We take popular Open Source server applications, remove all the install headaches and make them much easier to use.”

So does it?  Well I created an account so I could download one of the apps, Joomla (since I’m familiar with it and have used it before).  I got the entire 220MB package downloaded (which stunned me since Joomla is a very small under 5MB package) and was ready to see how it worked.  I assume it must have some sort of run-time engine built in.  Well it didn’t and I was sorta surprised at what it really was.

Turns out all Jumbox is are pre-built virtual machines (generally used in VMWare, Parallels, etc).  So not only is this Joomla but its an entire OS too!  While this might be an easier approach to installing specific apps if I wanted to use the three I listed above I’ve now got three more servers to manage.  Security patches, software issues, etc.  Not at all what I was looking for.  Oh and they leave it to you to get the necessary runtime software (VMWare does have a free version called VMWare Player that lets you run but not create VM’s).

So right now I’m not overly impressed.  Oh and it didn’t help that when I opened the readme file (while still being confused as to what this really is) it was Unix formatted so I couldn’t read it in Notepad (which just annoys me).  Their site is also very vague about all this and I’m guessing that’s on purpose.  So nice concept but not the greatest execution.