Independant Java developers with big ideas but little cash or marketing knowledge can now get a free J2EE hosting and marketing solution. SoftwareMarkets offers developers applications hosting, object and relational databases (Oracle and Versant), a J2EE application server (Weblogic), certification, marketing, and support, all for free.

The only catch is that SoftwareMarkets will take a percentage of all sales of the product once developed, which is a very small price to pay for the low barrier to entry that they are providing.

Another concern I have (I am trying to verify this with SoftwareMarkets) is that the code you write isn't entirely J2EE. The docments on their site indicate that you need to use something called the "neuroflex api" for persisting your data, which would thus make it harder for you to port your code away from the SoftwareMarkets platform should your application succeed. But again, even this is a small price to pay for the incredible service SoftwareMarkets will be providing.

Read a techweb article about Software Markets.
Go to SoftwareMarkets.com.

FLoyd.
The Software site looks excellent! After wandering through the site a I got the impression that the persistence API is optional, it sais in several places that ejb's will be supported fully. I assume that means entity beans also.
Thanks for the info, this site has really been useful to me in keeping me infored of what is going on.
Jeff

SoftwareMarkets currently supports NeruroFlex API for persisting data. This Monday (Sept.18) we are releasing JDBC API over Oracles and will also present an enhancement of the existing NeuroFlex API. The need to support standards is obvious, and JDBC is a big step in this direction. We supply Type 4 JDBC driver for download from our site which can be conveniently used to persist data remotely. The databse supported at the backend is Oracle. The infrastructure to host EJBs (both session and entity), Servelets, JSP etc. is in the works. The Sept. 18th release features manual deployment. The JSP, Servelets, EJBs, Applets, HTML are submitted to SoftwareMarkets manually (on a web form) and we host it on regular intervals. Our next release will support automatic deployment.
I hope this helps clarify these issues, obviously I would be happy to answer any additional items concerning SoftwareMarkets and how we can best respond to developers needs.
eve@softwaremarkets.com

How can I register for the hosting? What is a fee for it?

After two years of the original posting, the site doesn't seem existing anymore. Sad news.

is this still available?