After #JaxLondon and #vmwareforum , I have been bombarded with cloud foundry information and paraphernalia.
Lucky during vmwareforum I was very privileged to sit down with about 10 or so others with Tod Nielsen (@Wembley !) to discuss the future of application development. The guys at VMWare clearly are trying to cover as much ground as possible and garner as many developers into using and integrating with the infrastructure that Vmware are bundling together , either naturally or through acquisitions.
I tried to highlight that one of the key areas they should concern themselves ,if they want to draw more developers is with is desktop tools integration for IDEs like Eclipse or Intellij. The already have decent client tools for VMWare ESX , I don’t see why it cant be incorporated into Eclipse or visa versa somehow to simplify quick iterative develop and deploy that developers could use.
The other intriguing factor with cloudFoundry is that Java with Spring (unsurprisingly as they also purchased springsource) is the main focus , but its Open Source aspect I’m guessing it will open it up to a lot more flexibility from the community. In its first sixty days since beta launch Tod admitted to the fact that around 60% of deployments where in fact on Ruby , with 30% for Java & 10% for Node.js etc. Quite surprising, considering the heavy investment.He also admitted (blushingly) to be the one to blame for the northwind access Database .He got booed for that , we were at Wembley after all!
Along with further innovation in NoSQL is on its way (if not here already) , it makes for a very interesting stack they are building.With commercial partners in Colt to be ready to host real applications with real SLAs , a lot of prospects would be confident to jump on.
I am still struggling however how we go about going seamlessly from a private PaaS to a public one and back again. I think this is a time of throw it out there and see what happens over the next 12 months and lets see what sticks and lets see what falls by the way side. I think some developers I know will try a few things out with the set-ups and see if they can port some simple apps to get a flavour of what’s possible.
Tour of Wembley at the end was fun 