paul.nowak wrote: Matt, thanks for the comments. I made an error on the version of Plone. It's 2.5 Plone running on Zope 2.9x.
In regards to the additional products, we have a skin installed and we have a product that we had custom developed for us that connects to a PostgreSQL database. We've looked at slow PostgreSQL queries causing problems and have not been able to find an issue. We've also tested for the case where the PostgreSQL server is down and have not been able to create an issue. We therefor...
For cloud computing to take off, there need to be tools available that enable a developer to build and deploy an application without having to download anything to their desktop. This requires an on-demand development tool that sits on top of the cloud and provides a development Platform as a Service (PaaS).
There are two paths that a vendor can take to create a development platform for cloud computing: cloud-first or tool-first.
Cloud-first approach to PaaS: first build a cloud platform, then build a development tool that runs on top of it. This is the approach pioneered by Force.com and followed by Coghead and Bungee Labs.
Tool-first approach to PaaS: first build a development platform that is host-able tool (e.g., studio runs in a browser), then "push" that platform into the cloud. This is the approach taken by WaveMaker.
For Force.com, it made a great deal of sense to take the cloud-first approach. SalesForce.com already had a robust cloud platform and expertise in building proprietary development tools to create their CRM application. There was also no requirement to make Force.com work on any other cloud, because SalesForce is aiming to be the only cloud you will ever need for all your enterprise apps.
For most software vendors, however, the cloud-first development process has distinct disadvantages. First of all, it puts you in the data center operations business, which requires a very different DNA than software development. Next, it makes development itself difficult, because the cloud adds a level of indirection and complexity to all development tasks. Finally, you will be forced to do cloud port eventually to get to a SaaS cloud people want to deploy on, like Amazon EC2 or Google App Engine (assuming they ever exit the Python ghetto).
A tool-first approach to PaaS development is much more straightforward. You start by creating a host-able development studio (pretty much rules out Eclipse plugins) and do your build and test on standard hardware. After you have build a solid product, you add multi-tenancy to the studio and customize deployment for your cloud of choice (or use a partner like Elastra to do the deployment and administration for you).
A final oddity of the cloud-first vendors is that they have all delivered proprietary development platforms. This provides a "roach motel" level of lock-in - your logic and data can checkin, but just try moving them to another RIA or AJAX platform! Again, SalesForce can throw its 500-pound gorilla weight around and make the Apex language successful. It is hard to imagine, however, that 5 years from now people who have learned the Coghead language will be in more demand than, say, Java developers.
About Christopher Keene Christopher Keene is Chairman and CEO of WaveMaker (formerly ActiveGrid). Chris was the founder, in 1991, of Persistence Software, a San Mateo, CA-based company that created a new approach for managing data in high-transaction banking and communications systems. Persistence Software investors included Cisco, Intel, Reuters and Sun Microsystems. The company went public in 1999 on the NASDAQ exchange and was sold in 2004 to Progress software.After leaving Persistence Software in 2005, Chris spent a year in France as chairman of Reportive Software, a Paris-based maker of business-intelligence tools, and as an adjunct professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school.
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#3
Claeton Giordano commented on 3 Nov 2008
Proprietary development toolsets have a long history. PowerBuilder and VisualBasic didn't offer the flexibility and power of C, but they enabled rapid, if inelegant, development of business apps. In the Cloud, the same could end up being true of Coghead. There are a lot of reasons why that would be a suboptimal outcome, nonetheless a possible one.
#2
NS commented on 25 Aug 2008
What about other PaaS vendors like LongJump and Quickbase? Anyone have experience in using them?
Don't forget tools that help create "cloud-like" Utility Computing infrastructures out of what you own today (any HW, any VM). Cassatt can primarily do this, although there are other less automated tools on the market too, and even VMware has its eyes on trying to help make clouds.
These tools can automate how HW is repurposed, how and when VMs are created, where networks should be routed etc. etc. with the express purpose of maintaining application service levels, regardless of demand. This is essentially PaaS that is the underpinning behind "clouds".
Claeton Giordano wrote: Proprietary development toolsets have a long history. PowerBuilder and VisualBasic didn't offer the flexibility and power of C, but they enabled rapid, if inelegant, development of business apps. In the Cloud, the same could end up being true of Coghead. There are a lot of reasons why that would be a suboptimal outcome, nonetheless a possible one.
Ken Oestreich wrote: Don't forget tools that help create "cloud-like" Utility Computing infrastructures out of what you own today (any HW, any VM). Cassatt can primarily do this, although there are other less automated tools on the market too, and even VMware has its eyes on trying to help make clouds.
These tools can automate how HW is repurposed, how and when VMs are created, where networks should be routed etc. etc. with the express purpose of maintaining application service levels, regardless of demand. This is essentially PaaS that is the underpinning behind "clouds".
This is a deal that has been around for all of this year, and I know the NYC-based guy charged with pulling the technical pieces together. He has been looking at software platforms for months and separating contenders from pretenders based on the criteria he's established. To my knowle...
3Leaf Systems, the well-funded start-up, dropped its fig leaf Tuesday and took a running jump into the pools of memory, I/O and cache that it can construct and deconstruct at will based on the application, creating scale-up shared-memory SMP systems the likes of mainframes, proprietary...
Funambol, a provider of open source mobile cloud sync and push email for billions of phones, today announced it has acquired Zapatec, Inc., a leader of AJAX web 2.0 frameworks. The acquisition enables Funambol to uniquely address the industry pervasive device fragmentation challenge th...
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SOASTA, a provider cloud testing, today announced that performance engineers can now build web application tests in Apache JMeter, the most popular open source load testing tool, and run them in SOASTA's Global Test Cloud. Deploying JMeter tests to the Cloud has been a complex, time-co...
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This is a deal that has been around for all of this year, and I know the NYC-based guy charged with pulling the technical pieces together. He has been looking at software platforms for months and separating contenders from pretenders based on the criteria he's established. To my knowle...
3Leaf Systems, the well-funded start-up, dropped its fig leaf Tuesday and took a running jump into the pools of memory, I/O and cache that it can construct and deconstruct at will based on the application, creating scale-up shared-memory SMP systems the likes of mainframes, proprietary...
Funambol, a provider of open source mobile cloud sync and push email for billions of phones, today announced it has acquired Zapatec, Inc., a leader of AJAX web 2.0 frameworks. The acquisition enables Funambol to uniquely address the industry pervasive device fragmentation challenge th...
Plone and Drupal are two leading open source Content Management Systems (CMS). Both were recognized in the 2009 Open Source CMS awards, run by Packt Publishing. Both also have large installed bases and large developer communities. This is made evident by some quick searching on Googl...
SOASTA, a provider cloud testing, today announced that performance engineers can now build web application tests in Apache JMeter, the most popular open source load testing tool, and run them in SOASTA's Global Test Cloud. Deploying JMeter tests to the Cloud has been a complex, time-co...
Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, took its second major step in five months towards open-source cloud computing today, debuting an open source version of Traffic Server, a high performance application server for builders of cloud services. Traffic Server ena...
