Our Mission

Nowadays, developing, deploying, and hosting web applications requires a tremendous amount of work and skills. For example, to host a web application you need to rent or buy a server, install it, configure a web application, and database server, and maintain all of it. Additionally, deploying a service that, for example, was written in PHP, Ruby, or Java requires you to copy your service to that server, test it on the server, and take care that everything works well in that environment. This environment will usually consists of three tiers (i.e. browser, middleware, and database) all of which require extra configuration and administration effort. Moreover, each tier has its own data model (e.g. Tables or Objects) and programming language (Java Script, Java, or SQL). All this is painful to create and maintain.

The vision of 28msec, Inc. is to provide ONE platform to easily develop, test, deploy, and host web applications. Specifically, a user who has a great idea and wants to offer a service on the web should be able to efficiently develop and test this service on his (client) machine. After successfully developing the service he wants to publish it. Publishing should not require more effort then pushing one button on his machine. The service will be deployed on your (or our) cloud infrastructure and you pay-as-you-go. This infrastructure is build on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Because existing web application languages and frameworks are distributed among several tiers, developing and deploying your application can be painful. For example, think about the object-relational mapping if you use Java and SQL, or about the pain of administrating your server which is running a MySQL database. In order to remedy this situation, we at 28msec have decided to go a new way: At 28msec we are entirely focused on developing full-fledged web applications entirely in XQuery.

XQuery is a functional and declarative language which has been designed by the World Wide Web Consortium as a general purpose XML processing language, useful in a variety of architectures and environments. Although, in the beginning, XQuery was mainly used to query XML data within database systems, it has more and more become a complete application programming language. We call one such architecture in which XQuery is used as a full-fledged programming language the XML end-to-end architecture. In such an architecture, XML is the primary form in which the information is stored and being processed. This information is persistent across successive invocations of programs, and XQuery is the primary language for accessing this information to search, filter, transform, update, and for writing more complex application workflows. In such programs, XQuery has also become fluent with web entities such as REST, web services, Atom, Ajax, HTTP messages, and common authentication techniques such as OpenID or OAuth. Together with its extension specifications XQuery Update, XQuery Scripting, and XQuery Full Text, XQuery nowadays plays in the same league as general purpose programming languages such as Java, Python, or Ruby while keeping its edge in terms of expressiveness and first-class support for dealing with web resources.

Getting started is really easy: You just need to download Sausalito and can immediately start developing your application in our Eclipse-based development environment. For learning about this development environment, good starting points are our Screencast and our Step-by-step instructions. In order to run your application, you need to register a user account. Such an account can be used to freely try your application in the cloud (with limited traffic, throughput, and storage). If you're interested in a full account, please contact us at .