Christopher Keene

Chris Keene's "Keene View" Blog 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.co... (more)

Data Access for RIAs

ZapThink just produced a good report on the state of Web 2.0 tools entitled "Evolution of the Rich Internet Applcation Market." In the report, Jason Bloomberg and Ron Schmelzer of Zapthink highlight a critical gap in most RIA solutions: the inability to access data from within the UI. They then point to this as a major source of competitive advantage for Adobe: "Adobe stands alone as the only vendor who offers a commercial, RIA-specific data access product." It is probably not completely fair to expect Zapthink to include in last week's report a product that was released last wee... (more)

Cloud Computing is the Hardware Equivalent of ATMs

Chris Keene's "Keene View" Blog Cloud computing is custom made for Silicon Valley - it is poorly defined, seemingly vast and has the potential to change human life as we know it (at least for those of us who live in Silicon Valley). Since so many people are jumping on the cloud bandwagon, I thought it would be useful to look not at what cloud computing is but at what cloud computing isn't. . Of course, we have our fair share of naysayers (like Larry and Richard), as well as theories about why those naysayers are down on cloud computing. Cloud computing is the hardware equivalent of a... (more)

The World Is Your Oyster: Installing and Using Cloud Foundry on Windows

Cloud Foundry is an incredibly cool way to build and deploy cloud apps to any target cloud using very simple commands. The basic api has just three commands:vmc target cloud.url //targets a cloudvmc login // login to cloudvmc push // run your app in the cloudThree commands and the (cloud) world is your oyster! Very cool. This may be just me but I found it difficult to follow the install guide for Cloud Foundry on my windows machine. For those of us trapped behind corporate firewalls and proxy servers, things got even more complicated. After scurrying around the cloud foundry forums a... (more)

SaaS Platforms For ISVs and Who Wins?

McKinsey & Company published a report predicting the market size for Software as a Service (SaaS) will exceed $37B market over the next 5 years. In particular, the report described the need for Independent Software Vendors to SaaS-enable their products using special-purpose SaaS development tools. Matt Asay also wrote recently that the growth of the top 60 software companies is driven by SaaS. McKinsey claims that traditional J2EE and .NET platforms are poorly suited to building SaaS applications. According to McKinsey, this opens up a $3B market for Platform as a Service (... (more)