One of my fellow Microsoft Regional
Director recently gave me this link to a talk by David
Chappell given in Dutch DevDays (of course the talk is in English, otherwise I
would not have understood to repost here). A little history here - I first came to
know about David
Chappell from his legendary book Understanding
ActiveX and OLE. Before this book (released in 1996)
the more I read on Microsoft OLE from books like Inside COM and Inside OLE, the more
I got confused (purely due to my lack of my experience with advanced C++). Instead
Chappell’s book on the subject made OLE/COM approachable to every Software Engineer
and finally I could understand it. Chappell followed this home run with his other
book Understand
.NET, which introduced and explained then the new .NET platform in the
finest fashion.
Coming back to the subject of this post, so when I got this link to listen to David
Chappell talking on Application Platform, I immediately spent the next 60 minutes
on it. If you are involved with Application Platform in any manner then I recommend
you see this video too.
In this video Chappell in brief goes through the history of Application Platform,
why they came into being, the war between Microsoft and Java on dominating
this trend and the current status in his view with Java world fragmenting. He then
goes on to talk about why he thinks SOA (Software Oriented Application/Architecture) has
failed in general – I concur on his observations that most of the time it is not about
technology, it is about People, Power and Money. Traditionally in large businesses “Data”
sharing between departments is achievable but “Application” sharing is just
not practical and unfortunately that is what SOA vendors kept pushing. Finally he
provides a model of cloud platform and an excellent comparison between the various
vendor’s cloud offerings – Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine,
SalesForce, Oracle & IBM.
Read the complete post at http://venkatarangan.com/blog/2009/07/27/What+Is+An+Application+Platform+Comparison+Of+Cloud+Platforms.aspx