Build with Catalyst: Migrate your app from another platform to AppSail

For our next use case in the Build with Catalyst series, we'll look at how you can quickly migrate your application from a different platform to AppSail with ease.

Check out our previous posts in the series to learn:

• How you can build an AI-based lead scoring engine using Catalyst Quick ML
• How you can build a crawler for e-commerce using Catalyst SmartBrowz
• How you can build and host an LMS on Catalyst AppSail
• How you can automate your sales incentive flow using CRM Event Listeners

Now, let's get started!

What is Catalyst AppSail?

AppSail is a highly-scalable platform-as-a-service (PaaS) that facilitates building and hosting powerful applications using popular desired frameworks.

Catalyst AppSail supports:

• Python frameworks like Django, Flask, CherryPy, Bottle, Falcon, Pyramid, Tornado, and more.
• Java frameworks like SpringBoot, SpringMVC, Jetty, Struts, Vaadin, and more.
• Node.js frameworks like Express, HAPI, Koa, Restify, and more.

To learn how you can get started with AppSail, please check out these demo videos.

How to migrate your dynamic web app to Catalyst AppSail?

AppSail, being a PaaS that supports independent applications of any framework, facilitates the migration of solutions from other platforms to Catalyst efficiently. Based on your business requirements, you can choose to use Catalyst for all your development needs and transfer your existing applications from external platforms.

You can migrate your Python, Java, and Node.js apps to Catalyst with ease immaterial of the complexity or the scale of your application.

What would you need to migrate your application?

• Add a Java AppSail service from the CLI either in Java SE or Java WAR formats.
• The deployable main file is typically a .js file.
• The deployable main file is typically a .py file.

Let's look at the benefits of migrating your app to AppSail with a few use cases

1. Imagine you run a small-scale manufacturing unit that produces handcrafted goods. You run a basic attendance management app on your server that records check-in and check-out times. You decide to expand your business and workforce, and increase production. You would need a feature-rich application to manage attendance and running it on your servers won't cut it anymore. You would want to migrate the hosting of your application from your servers to a cloud provider.

Catalyst AppSail would be the ideal fit for you in this situation. You can export your application and directly host it on Catalyst easily. You can also employ Catalyst's readily available microservices to expand the capabilities of your application. You can use Authentication to manage and validate user profiles, write Functions to calculate and keep a tab on work hours, use Mails and Push Notifications to update your employees on time, and more.

2. Say you are a legacy content management company and have been using an on-premise machine for hosting a Java application that takes care of your content storage and maintenance. You choose to take your services global. On-premise is not a feasible solution anymore. Your application must run on the cloud.

You can move from on-premise to the cloud quickly. Export your application as a WAR file and run it on Catalyst. Your application can be moved to the cloud as it is using Catalyst AppSail. You can also take advantage of the full-featured sandbox to build additional functionalities for your application at no cost. You only pay once you deploy to production.

3. If you are a startup that has made a video streaming application hosted on a different platform, during peak traffic, you need ample provisioning to address scalability and handle the large number of requests. This comes at a high cost as you are paying for server provisioning even when the traffic scales down sporadically.

In this situation, migrating your application to Catalyst is perfect. On Catalyst AppSail, your application scales up automatically by spawning instances whenever the request threshold is reached. Above all, the pay-per-use model ensures you pay only for what you use, thus significantly reducing what you spend for your app to run smoothly.

We will continue to look at various kinds of use cases and how you can leverage the capabilities of Catalyst to quickly build feature-rich applications and solutions. Stay tuned to this space to learn about it all.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section or get a detailed one-on-one session. We will come back next week with another compelling use case. Check this space often to see how you can take full advantage of Catalyst and its capabilities.