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)

Five Free Mashup Tools You Should Know About

Mashups is a pretty broad term. A good definition for a mashup tool is a solution that allows developers to combine interesting data and then visualize that data through a web application Usually, mashups are web applications that can be created quickly using standard web services (e.g., REST) and components (e.g., Widgets). There are three kinds of Mashup tools: front end, back end and integrated. The differences are: Front end mashup tools: these tools help build web front ends like dashboards using widgets/gadgets and little to no programming (iGoogle, PageFlakes) Back end mash... (more)

Why Open Source Java will Win SaaS Platform Wars

Chis Keene's Blog 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... (more)

Cloud Ready Computing

Cloud computing offers significant economies in deploying and managing applications. While enterprises are not yet ready to move mission-critical applications to cloud computing, CIOs and CTOs are increasingly wanting to create applications that are "cloud-ready." A cloud-ready application is based on an architecture which provides the flexibility to deploy the application to either a traditional data center or into a private or public cloud infrastructure. This flexibility ensures that enterprises can take advantage of cloud computing benefits whenever they choose. Being cloud-r... (more)

Cloud Computing Is the Destination, Not the Journey

Cloud Foundry at Cloud Expo I have had some interesting conversations recently with partners about how cloud computing will affect the developer tools market. I don't believe developers jump on a band wagon just because they like the wagon. They jump on the wagon because they like where the wagon is going! Roughly every 10 years, a technology disruption changes developer aspirations and drives them to adopt new tools that get them to new places. With client/server, developers aspired to build "modern" apps and break free of the bureaucracy of central IT. Cloud computing offers a sim... (more)