Well yesterday brought the PDC 2008 keynote with Ray Ozzie finally explaining Microsoft’s compute on demand strategy. However after following it and reading analysis I became very disappointed. I know, I know, its a Microsoft keynote it will be around the Microsoft toolbox and thus is unlikely to be relevant to me. But This time I had heard rumours and expected something a little different, elements that would extend way beyond the visual studio toolbox.

Microsoft have been talking about being more open and talking about things outside of their regular dev toolbox. The words I had heard were ‘PHP’ and ‘Eclipse’ amongst others. Not only that but for these two at least I had seen a great deal of confirmation from other sources, like Microsoft working with Zend and the Eclipse org. Thus I was expecting their compute on demand offerings to include at least PHP and possibly others outside of the visual studio regulars. It was a surprise to me that these outsiders were not mentioned in the keynote or subsequent analysis. You see unlike 5-10 years ago where Microsoft pretty much 0wn3d Developers, there are now many large parties of devs outside of their toolbox/language reach. It has therefore got to be a priority for Microsoft to some how leverage at least some of these out lying groups and to entice them into their new strategy. At the least I would expect Microsoft to play their familiar embrace and extend card, but there was no sign of it.

Luckily after following through on the commentary I came across a channel 9 video (silverlight less version) by Manuvir Das (Director in the Windows Azure team) that provided a much more in depth explanation of Azure. Not only does this video better explain Azure and it’s infrastructure but it also alludes to those missing pieces I expected to hear about. Just after halfway through the real elephant in the room is revealed, as the virtualisation is explained the presenter reveals (around 22 minutes in) that other languages do actually run within their new virtualised platform. Not only does he use the ‘PHP’ word and Python but he also drops the real anvil he mentions ‘RAILS’ ! not just Ruby but ‘Ruby on Rails’! That would mean they have gotten rails running on their virtual machine and will have ActiveRecord ported to their virtualised infinite storage - Bingo!! If this is true it could be big, it would mean Microsoft could attract PHP, Python and Rails devs into their cosy cloud play. It could be very attractive much like like Google’s AppEngine is for Pythonistas, infinite indestructible storage, instant scalability to as many systems you can shake a stick at, all in the releative safety of your favorite web language or DSL.

So what do you think about this huge cloud based hug to web developers, is this a master stroke from Microsoft, their worse kept secret, or are we being invited to put our heads inside the lions mouth ? Let me know your thoughts. Any links to further info or analysis about this would also be appreciated.

P.S. Yes I know this doesn’t mean it is a pure ‘Open’ play and I know that still hasn’t emerged from any player yet, but it is a still a very interesting story from a developers POV.

Just a quick post to mention a new blog 3fficienct that I am working on. This blog rather than a personal blog like this one, is actually serving a specific purpose. As part on my day job I have been dealing with small datacenter requirements for many years in order to manage the software we engineer for our clients. Recently we have embarked on a project that scratches an itch we had within the datacenter around high efficiency servers. It’s a really interesting project that will be sharing both hardware and software developed during the process of solving the challenges. If your interested in open hardware and or software or just I.T. efficiency and reducing your carbon footprint check it out.

They do it already indirectly via your revenue from them, so why not go the whole hog and let them pay for it outright. At least if they are paying for it they will make sure it is focused on delivering value for them and hence is likely to result in much greater ROI than the I.T department could ever muster. So what happens to the I.T department? Well your customers become the I.T department, all of them! just imagine that, all of those folks providing you with support.

Here is a scenario, someone inside your organisation (Alice) has a great new idea for a widget, but doesn’t know how to implement the processes or systems to produce, package and deliver the widget. At the moment the widget is just an idea, not an actual product, so first Alice needs to talk to the early adopters support department (ASD) to refine the product idea. So who are the ASD folks? they are of course the elite task force members of the same department as I.T Alice’s customers. So Alice collaborates with ASD, establishes that it’s a go product and refines the widget requirements. She then hands over the widget reqs to the buying department (BD).

The members of BD actually have two roles, the first is to coordinate the just-in-time (JIT) manufacture and supply of widgets. Their second role is of course as the I.T department for a number of Widget manufacturers. Because Alice’s widget has never been made before a few of the BD folk are acting as the JIT supplier’s ASD task force. After collaborating with the JIT suppliers via your I.T systems a widget solution emerges to meet the costs and quality targets established by Alice’s ASD task force.

Alice is now happy to move forward with widget production and delivery, so she engages with the marketing and communications department (MCD). Who are the MCD? well the MCD are the same department as the I.T. department, her customers of course. What Alice needs to do is collaborate and engage with her customers in order to help them understand the new widget. She is hoping that they will like the new widget as much as the ASD folks. Of course the ASD folks are also members of the MCD themselves and collaborate with other members of the MCD by engaging in conversations around the new widget, assisted by Alice and here colleagues. But Alice has been here before and knows this is no time for sitting on your laurels, there is still much to do. So she listens to the MCD and tweeks the widgets to help them slip through the MCDs more quickly and in growing numbers, the widget becomes more and more refined and more and more slippy until one day Alice realises she has a hit. But she doesn’t go all Britney Spears about it, because she knows it wasn’t her achievement, she recognises she was just helping to Teflon coat the tubes, so she makes sure that all of the departments know how insanely great they were with this widget. Just as she is doing this one of her colleagues engaged with an MCD, notices they are doing something different with the widget and suddenly has this brilliant new idea….

Examples of customer I.T : Blogs, getsatisifaction, twitter, wiki’s, social networks, VRM and lots more coming…..

Well it’s been a while since I have posted on what I have been working on, but figured it was about time to give you all an update. First of all I’ve ben busy as hell the last few months and it seems that it isn’t likely to change in the foreseeable future.

Second a little history is in order, last year as some of you are probably aware we built the first prototypes for Rel3. Rel3 was originally a framework that I was designing to build Folknology projects. Instead of just building a framework, I figured I should actually build something useful with the frame work concurrently. Doing things this way means you build a useful framework that does something concrete rather than just an endless series of components built without scope or constraint. Turns out this is a good way to build stuff because you end up scratching itches that exist. The downside is it seems to take forever, one of the reasons I called the project code name rel3 was because I had already built the thing twice so logically the next version would be release 3 AKA ‘Rel3’. We also gave a sneak preview of a rel3 app last year at wiki wednesday which some of you guys attended. In the interim we got some commercial interest from a couple of paying gigs and proceeded to build a prototype for one of them. That prototype based on rel3 is still in testing and has been going through several revisions.

In the meantime I was still not happy with rel3 the framework, it needed to be more robust, scalable and extensible. In addition I was getting requests for commercial projects that I wanted to build using the framework. Thus over the last few months I have completely rebuild the framework to meet it’s architectural goals and commercial requirements. The new framework is built using Erlang/OTP and I (with help from Phil) have named it Reactor, to be precise the project is actually called Reactored and the framework engine is called reactor. here is a potted history

1. 2005 Rel1 - Java/Xml based framework - To complex and unwieldy
2. 2006 Rel2 - Java + Groovy/Grails based framework - Simpler but messy
3. 2007 Rel2.5 - Ruby/Rail based framework - Failed, Rails got in the way
4. 2007 ReL3 - Erlang/ErlyWeb - Success but messy (wouldn’t dare show code in public!)
5. 2008 Reactor - Erlang/OTP - Everything we ever wanted and more, it just Rocks!

Reactor is the core of OTP components that do the heavy lifting. Reactored expands the scope to combine the Reactor engine with the following components in future:

1. Web server Yaws and ErlyWeb,
2. Messaging ejabbered and RabbitMQ
3. Non native CGI/FW Python 1st then maybe Php ,Ruby..
4. Whatever anyone wants and is willing to contribute

Some advantages we are already benefitting from:

1. Yaws is native in the framework language unlike Apache
2. Highly perform-ant, scalable, redundant and eventually reliable!
3. Component, modular and simpler to extend to requirements.

So what the hell is Reactor and what is Reactored for?
I will take the second first, Reactored will be the community that I hope we can build around Reactor and it is of course OpenSource (GPL’d). As for Reactor, well that will probably take a number of posts and examples to explain, but here is a brief description in the meantime.

Reactor is a new angle on building web based projects. It focuses on packets, patterns and events. It’s a reactive framework built around REST based cached/distributed storage, queues/sinks and domain based pattern matching.
Perhaps the best way of visualizing it is comparing it to existing domain patterns where we store and then post process using techniques like search and query. With a reactive storage we do the queries in realtime (as data enters) using pattern matching. The framework also allows for common post storage queries using search, tags and identity avoiding the need for a separate query language.

Reactor is not a web framework, but is something that can be integrated into an existing web framework. I will however be adding Yaws and ErlyWeb support as a matter of personal preference. Next likely stop is a python framework integration, but this largely depends on some help with the Python, that also goes for any other language frameworks such as PHP, Ruby etc.. You could think of it a new type of backend for frameworks, except if you did you would miss out how frontend it can be!

It goes without saying of course that if any of this is mildly interesting to you and you would like to find out more or contribute in some way please tweet/comment/email me and let me know, here are some indications of skills that could really help:

1. Erlang geeks - anyone looking to join an OpenSource erlang project, I don’t just mean experts if you already have Python/Javascript and are learning Erlang count yourself in.
2. Javascript,AJAX,Air geeks that want to play with interesting new frameworks
3. Testers, documentors, evangelists, bloggers and general participants if your interested your in!

In terms of code and project status, Reactor will be functionally complete at version 0.1 on Sunday June 1 2008 (probably midnight!), if you are impatient,just request it and I can send a tarball. For everyone else if you could wait a few days/weeks whilst I get the code out of my private GIT repository and into a public repository (GitHub/GoogleCode?). I will also be setting up the project website/blog/tracking stuff as and when I can over the next few months using the reserved reactored.org domain.

I guess you can consider this the unofficial announcement of Reactored!

* Update It is now available from the public Git repository at Reactored on GitHub now

So if Umair really is correct regarding evil DNA leading to industrial strategic incompetence in the 21st century and that Facebook really is Anakin Skywalker, we can as DJK proclaims, predict the inevitable outcome. Lets play along with the supposition for a little fun..

After Facebook’s meteoric rise it is taken under the wing of the emperor, in this case Microsoft, led toward the darkside, betraying its original underlying principles. Here Facebook is taught to use the darkside of the force - ‘competition’ rather than the ‘collaborative’ side of the force. It is now using the darkside to try and dominate the universe. But The darkside has a fundamental weakness and Facebook’s Glass Jaw is showing us its Achilles heal, this is providing the rebellion and the Jedi a fighting chance.

At this point we are up to date in the story, I think Steve Gillmor might have us believe that luke is Mesh or ‘Twitter’, but Mesh and Twitter are not of Facebook’s loins, I think however Steve may be Obi-Wan and could help lead Luke from anonymity to center stage. Later Luke will visit the wise Yoda to train as a Jedi and fight for the forces of good, he will be taught to use the collaboration and not fall foul of the darkside by controlling his competitive feelings. So who is Luke and how will we recognize him, well he is to become a Jedi, standing for good and using the ‘collaborative force’ to fight the ‘competitive darkside’ so we will judge him by his actions, trust will be our compass. And who are the rebellion? well that one one is easy, it’s you and me fighting for what we know is good, helping and supporting Luke. In this sense Luke may turn out to be the first of many Jedi showing others the way with VRM.

Of course the burning questions is that in Facebook’s last minutes will it turn and save luke from Microsoft and show that it was not all evil, but as Luke believed, it had some good left in it..

*Update If what Scoble says is correct that makes this story all the more interesting.

After my speculation last week on Google’s cloud play, yesterday they announced Google Application Engine (GAE), I figured I would wait a day before providing a response. Overall the speculation was about right but the language implementation was some way off, here are my initial thoughts.

Guido van Rossum (GVM) obviously pulled rank on Steve Yegge (SY) and presumably GAE was already under way before GROR. I would certainly imagine SY’s GROR seeing light of day along with Google’s CVM (Cloud Virtual Machine) with JVM languages. I’m now thinking the language order might even be Python (obviously), Java, Javascript (GROR) followed by the rest and excluding C++, my assumption here is that they build their CVM on Sun’s JVM. Although they could pull an android and not use the JVM but instead use there own Java runtime. If Google was paranoid and wanted complete control in their cloud infrastructure, using their own Java engine removes the third party reliance on Sun for the JVM. The disadvantage to this route is they loose all that has been built on the JVM, like extra language support etc..

But what do you get with GAE, what’s the real killer benefit of using it? As someone who has been building and maintaining web applications for nigh on a decade I have come to appreciate the advances in frameworks and libraries. When Ruby on rails (ROR) appeared web app developers suddenly found they could create basic prototypes in record time. In many ways ROR was the climax of MVC domain modeling based around the combination of web server, MVC code and SQL backends. Unfortunately ROR is the climax of an old paradigm that does not scale as easily as it could. If you look at the backend of successful web players like Ebay, Amazon, Google etc..Their architectures are very different from the traditional 3 tier model ROR was built on. The architectures that are used by these organisations are designed with rather different goals for example.

• Huge distributed storage
• Load balanced storage
• load balanced models/views
• Distributed session replication
• Joins replaced by indexes
• Map reduce rather than SQL
• High fault tolerant
• Transparent failover
• Multi datacenter and location

All of these features solve issues that we (My companies & clients) have had to deal with manually in the past. Building solutions to these features is hugely time consuming and implementation is extremely costly. Google with GAE have just delivered most of these absolutely free of charge, with GAE you don’t need to worry about this stuff anymore it’s done for you. This isn’t just evolution it’s the next logical stage in web app development and what’s more it will be available to anyone with an PC, internet connection and rudimentary knowledge of Python. Oh and for the traditionalists they even provide GQL so you 3 tierers feel right at home! So guess what, if you are a small web apps developer do yourself a favour learn python and get coding for GAE it’s a lot easier than building everything on the list, you will be laughing all the way to the bank at your ROR competitors. There are also some great killer development features such as instant deployment and version control along with an administrative console.

Of course anything thats is as innovative as this is bound to put a few noses out of joint, those that have most to loose by its arrival. Already I hear negative rumblings in the ROR community, my take on that? Do what Google has done with python on their infrastructure, build something scalable and competitive that supports your beloved framework. The biggest problem for anyone competing is likely to be ‘Free’, you could build a ruby applications engine using AWS, but who would sponsor the ‘Free’ version?

Where is Microsoft in all this, well I guess they have their own cloud (red dog?) ideas based around similar features and using their own preferred languages like C# and Basic/ASP on their CLR. They might even throw a bone to the ROR folks via an ironruby cloud infrastructure, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

But we also need to consider what we are getting into with GAE, if we build into GAE we are locking ourselves into Google’s future. During the campfire announcements the presenters kept using the ‘P’ word (‘Platform’,’our platform’ etc..),so lets be careful out there folks, we know how it turned out with the Microsoft Platform don’t we..

P.S. Anyone spot my purposeful error in this post regarding GAE features?

So if data is the new currency (microcurrency), Information Technology (I.T) can be seen in a much clearer light. Information Technology therefore moves from a cost centre to a value provider or enhancer. That is I.T if correctly applied will turn your current data currency into an even more valuable microcurrency, a process of adding or leveraging the value of your data via I.T value engineering.

Now remembering of course that the purpose of business is to deliver value to customers, then it would suggest that your I.T should be adding value to your customers using the microcurrency of data. Obviously the data value your are delivering to your customers may not be the only form of value delivery, but it is an important part of the overall package value. For example Amazon.com delivers value in terms of convenience and data (user recommendations etc..) as part of any physical product it ships. Amazon ensures that it’s I.T delivers maximum value to it’s customers and that is how it makes decisions about what I.T to employ. It is also fair to say that different businesses offer different levels of data value to their customers, but it is also key to note that in any given market those maximising the data delivery components of the package are likely to provide greater value to their customers. With the obvious benefits that is likely to bring in terms of competitive advantage.

It is important to consider what information technology one employs or implements when focusing on customer value delivery. Historically much software has been built on the cost model rather than the value add model. Luckily that model is changing and I.T. is now moving towards service provision rather than software licensing. This is important as a focus on service provision is aligned with measured value delivery rather than some mythical ROI estimate that the vendor has conjured. When the service providers and internal value delivery network (formely I.T dept) are aligned on the common goal of customer value creation and or maximization, the business execution becomes economically focused, amplified and agile. The I.T performance can actually be measured, monitored, tweeaked and optimised to gain the maximum benefit for the customer and hence one’s strategic advantage.

Simplistic Delivery model

Data_delivered = IT_strategic + Data_input

and

Service = Human Capital + IT_utility

Thus :-

Customer value delivered = Data + Service + Product ,

= IT_strategic + Data_input + Human Capital + IT_utility +Product

Where product may be omitted in pure service organisations.

I would also suggest that strategic I.T be implemented as a combination of service provision and customization to provide strategic difference, enhancement and advantage. The types of strategic I.T service provision will vary but I would imagine some core services will include collaborative and communication tools alongside a new generation of analytical and even intelligent agents. Strategic I.T also favours multiple sources and customisation rather than single source, as that is how maximum value can be derived, unlike utility I.T where single source provision is likely to remain the norm. One other interesting point to those responsible for strategic I.T, you are likely to be sourcing your service providers much closer to those at the bleeding edge, you are in fact taking part in early adoption which is a very different position to your utilitarian counterparts. Further do not expect these service providers to supply R.O.I collateral like their utility brethren. Your focus must instead be on tacit knowledge capture and sharing, data transformation and leveraging as well as data discovery, these are good candidates for strategic data value advantage.

Innovation and trust will play critical and symbiotic roles for strategic service partners, so expect them to provide creative tooling on top of data standardisation and offer provisions upon scalable and trusted networks. In otherwords, expect these providers to supply innovative tools, yet have their operations running on proven trustworthy facilities or networks, then you get the best of both worlds. Also expect them to offer the flexibility to stage the provisions internally, collaboratively and externally in a seamless fashion. These providers should bend like the wind to your strategic requirements, but also operate symbiotically with trusted infrastructure providers.

As we peer into Information Technology’s crystal ball I see great opportunities for businesses focused on value delivery, greater value for customers and a golden period of I.T innovation around data as a microcurrency. I expect this to be fueled by a heady mix of entrepreneurs and developers, we really do live in interesting times.

Notes - Product itself may also have some indirect I.T component which could be indirectly expressed as : Product = Raw materials + Service

But I have omitted that for brevity, as I have also omitted the recursive nature of value add in service (service_out = service_factored + service_added)

*Note this post was originally posted here

Although this may not seem like it at first, this post is about computing in the cloud, hang in there to the end it’s worth it. It stemmed from a remark that Mark Oliver made in response to the GCloud post yesterday.

So lets talk about money, once upon a time money was made out of stuff that had real value like gold and silver. When successful folks (todays equivalent of business folks) got lots of it they developed a security problem. Keeping their real money value safe was a job they had to achieve through physical means, like hiding it away in what they considered secure places in their establishments or even on their person. Unfortunately this was a risky business and many of these folks were often fleeced both personally and via their establishments. Some saw this issue as an opportunity and started services to safeguard folks wealth on their behalf. These innovative entrepreneurs of their time created secure buildings to house folks valuables under lock and key, charging for the privilege of securing their goodies. Soon these entrepreneurs thought of even better ways to provide their security services, they would use the funds secured in their premises to create new value which they could loan to other entrepreneurs that had great ideas or big projects requiring investment.

In case you haven’t worked out what I’m talking about yet, the securing establishments were of course what we now know of as banks, the techniques they begun to employ were ‘leveraging’ making more value out of entrusted value, money in this case. So why the hell am I talking about banks and money, this is meant to be an educational cloud computing post no? Which brings me to my point, there is actually a very important connection between that period and now regarding value and trust. You see decades before this time if you had suggested to the well to do business folk of the era that they let someone else look after their money, they would have laughed you off their land, probably waving a large pointy stick for effect. But of course things change, folks get used to such innovative ideas and get over their irrational fears.

Well it turns out right now that business data (another form of value) is rather similar to where money was all those years ago. Innovative cloud computing entrepreneurs are suggesting that maybe they would be better looking after the businesses data than the businesses themselves, in many cases they have good reasons to do so. They can specialise in securing such data better than any individual business because they are in the ‘looking after data’ business. Many businesses are however waving pointed words at the evangelists representing the new Data vaults, chasing them away as fast as they approach. This will of course change and many businesses are already seeing through the thin veneer of change to reap the operational benefits of concentrating on their business instead. Indeed the more entrepreneurial Data Vaults are also now playing the leverage card whereby data entrusted with them is being leveraged to create further and greater value enabling them to offer lower cost (even free) data services.

So what I am suggesting here? data = money? Not quite, but your data is valuable just like money, I would also suggest that just like the money which you entrust your bank with, is very similar to how you should treat your data. That is come to terms with the fact that the right third party is likely to do a better job of securing or leveraging that data than you could ever expect to. So the question for yourself is really just who you trust with it and under what terms would you feel comfortable. What you should not do is chase those that have already had the vision to see this with sharp pointey sticks, instead do your self a favour and engage them in conversation and confront your fears..

*Note this post was originally posted here

Ok I know it’s April fools day and maybe I should be posting pranks, but something has been really bothering me about the cloud computing situation. Amazon are literally running away with the jewels and the other big players just seem to be standing around watching. Well thats not strictly true, IBM have mentioned their ‘blue cloud’, and we Know Microsoft have their own ‘live cloud’ plans (although not enumerated), Microsoft could also be acquiring Yahoo as a means to extend their cloud offering according to some sources. So where the hell is Google in all this? Surely they will take a hand in the cloud computing game, yet we hear the deafening sound of silence from them. That means to me (just like it would for Apple) that there is something huge going on, thinking differntly and with alternate business models, that is what this post is about.

I’m not alone in thinking that Google may do things differently with their cloud offerings, Winer thinks they will go with the freemium model (free and payed premium options) unlike Amazon’s AWS which is pay only. Freemium makes a great deal of sense for Google and is a model they obviously like, just take a look at Google Apps, it follows the freemium model perfectly. Google also has a history of doing free first and finding a business model after. In terms of business models there are a number of suggestions. Winer suggests reduced cost for Google technology acquisitions, the cloud acts as a combined VC/Technology platform, thus when they acquire successful implementations on their platform, integration into Google becomes a breeze. They also gain mindshare allowing educational establishments to use their cloud for free, becoming part of the curriculum. There is also a huge identity battle going on right now with Microsoft,Yahoo etc.. this move could deliver a fatal blow to the other identity players if the Google cloud use became prolific. In addition successful implementations would likely move to the premium GCloud, bringing in direct revenue. Ok enough speculation around Google’s motive and business models lets crack into how the hell they could do it.

Now if we assume they go the freemium route, they would need a system that can scale with free. This is no mean feat, free can get pretty prolific very fast, if free meant everyone got an EC2 equivalent that could add up to a severe drain on even Google’s resources. This is where I believe Google may ‘think different’, they will need more control and greater scalability without limiting innovation. Also I believe they will want to make it easier to get started than the current AWS offerings, they would need a shorter learning curve. In this sense the GCloud would need to have some basic constraints and familiar development models to attract modern web application builders. So how will they do it, what will the cloud be made of, how will regular web developers use it?

So here is the really speculative part, if we assemble together Steve Yegge’s Next Big Language (NBL) and his recent project G-ROR (No not Ruby On Rails, it’s Rhino On Rails) as well as his top secret project NBE (Next Big Environment?) we can pick up some important clues. This are useful for several reasons:

1. Google intend using this stuff internally to build apps (at least prototyping them)
2. It is a perfect vehicle to build google API infrastructure into (GData,Search,OS..)

So what is NBE? My guess is that NBE is a combination of Java Virtual Machines (JVM) plus supporting Google API libraries with security wrappers. Here is how it could work; Google’s equivalent of EC2 would be a Cloud Virtual Machine (CVM), this CVM can run any suitable Java byte code that has been built with the CVM toolkit. The CVM toolkit does some sanity checking etc..to prevent abuse. Each CVM acts like a secure independent system (note - not operating system) isolated from the others with controls to enable you (or Google) to start, stop and control it remotely via a CVM API. These CVM instances will of course run in the Google managed datacentres.

So how will developers build the CVM apps? To start with I believe they will use G-ROR, a rails like development platform that includes an equivalent to active record for GData, allowing data to be stored in the GCloud transparently. It will be a development model that many are already familiar with, one which has already shown itself to be popular and very quick to get up to speed with. The main difference will be that the programming language (initially) will be Javascript rather than Ruby, this will appeal to an even wider developer audience, Google loves javascript in case you haven’t noticed - NBL?.

So there you have it, that is how they could deliver cloud computing ABC economically and with the constraints/controls required for a freemium model. They could run numerous CVM instances per server to make the whole infrastructure scalable and financially viable.

I think they could also offer premium CVMs, with extra features (more memory, dedicated processors etc..) building ontop of the JVM/CVM. They could for example offer existing server side language choices from the JVM such as JRuby, Jython, Groovy and Scala to name just a few. All of these compile down to Java byte code and could thus run on the CVM platform just by adding the required support libraries. And guess what, that would make Google’s CVM one of the most language accessible cloud platforms around, just look at how appealing that could be to the web developers everywhere (NBE?).

Of course this is all just idle speculation, but there may be a grain or two of truth to it. Does this Google cloud offer a developer’s silver lining ? I would be interested in what you think, does this idea appeal to you as a developer? Is what I am talking about severely floored? I am completely
nuts?,I wanna here you thoughts, go on let loose…

*Note this post was originally posted here

Welcome to the new version (Version 3 actually) of Folknology. This time I have done the sensible thing of using the best blogging software I could find, yup WordPress, I finally switched thanks for the gentle pushes in this direction everyone, you can all say you told me so!

I also wanted to go for a more simplistic and minimalist design, hence I chosen Hemingway, I found most of the other WP templates to be a little sucky..

Looking forward to more conversations, if anyone has any general feed back at this point let me know, as nows a really good time for changes..

Although I warn you my post will probably continue to be longer than they should and ‘Bursty’ in nature..

It’s great to have you all along for the ride.
regards
Al