ArabCrunch posted today (Arabic version) a write-up on vimov and our products.

ArabCrunch is the leading destination for coverage of technology and startups in the Arab world, and has recently launched ArabCrunch.net, a much needed wiki-style database of companies, investors, products and people in the technology field in the Arab world.

Aviate Front is a GUI front-end for Aviate, which runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Aviate Front allows you to easily create Deployment Files for your web applications using drag-and-drop of the various components supported by Aviate.

Still under development, it is quickly taking its shape, and most of the core functionality works. Below is a screenshot, and if you want to take a deeper look, the manual has instructions for compiling the source.

Aviate Front is developed in C++ using Qt.

The first release of Aviate has hit the runway.

Commonly, it has been that the more complicated a web application one develops is, or so it becomes throughout development, the more tedious and time-consuming the deployment process becomes. Unless one would automate the process by writing deployment scripts, he is bound to making mistakes, or having the web application down for too long due to making mistakes in the deployment, forgetting steps, or doing steps in an incorrect order.

Aviate was developed to make deploying web applications easier, by employing an easy-to-write XML file format that describes your deployment process. Whether it is copying files, decompressing archives, updating a database, synchronizing a directory, checking out from a version control system, or other actions, with Aviate you can make these actions through very simple to use XML tags.

It does not stop here though. Aviate was designed to be cross-platform, so it would become accessible to all developers, and it was designed to be highly extensible, so you can extend its features with ones you need but have not been yet implemented in Aviate. It is not for a specific language; whether your application is in PHP or in Ruby, you can write deployment scripts for it. Additionally, and soon, very soon, we’d be releasing a GUI front-end for Aviate that would allow developers to create deployment files by an intuitive drag and drop interface, thus making writing an XML file a history.

We have an extensive roadmap for Aviate. We hope the open source community would find it as valuable tool as we found it to be during our using it.

Have a taste of what Aviate can do by taking a look at an example deployment file.