Developers get cloud services portal

(API) designed to provide a 'self-service' portal for access to third-party service providers, says Dr Dobbs.

The new release targets developers purchasing incremental cloud services to bring additional functionality into the applications they build on the AppHarbor platform.

Add-ons available with this release include MongoHQ, Cloudant, Redis To Go, Memcacher, New Relic and Mailgun - and each of these will integrate into a users pre-existing applications.

The services integrate into a user's pre-existing applications, enabling immediate and automatic access to the comprehensive capabilities of each offering.

According to ZD Net, Michael Friis, co-founder of AppHarbor, wanted to build a platform with an interface “that takes away pain of deployment” for .NET developers, which the company sees as an under-served market.

AppHarbor is also positioning itself as a competitor for and a choice for developers besides Microsoft's Azure. Friis argues that when using Azure, “the only services or databases that your application can use are the ones Microsoft offers.

He counters that AppHarbor will run any .NET code unmodified, and the PaaS is a marketplace open to all sorts of add-on providers: “We think this will give developers access to a much more diverse set of services that they can use in their applications.”