From the Editors: Clouds in the rear-view mirror… and windshield

By SD Times News Team

January 2, 2009 —

What happened in 2008? When you get beyond the mortgage meltdown and the business slowdown, the single biggest advance may have been in cloud-based computing. In fact, the increasing attractiveness of the cloud dovetails well with 2007’s biggest trend, that of service oriented architectures, and with today’s financially challenging climate.

The cloud grew out of initiatives from famous Internet companies, like Amazon.com, Google and Saleforce.com, and over the past couple of months it has been embraced by more conventional platform players, namely Microsoft and Sun. What makes the cloud work? Web services. How does the cloud work with enterprises? Through service oriented architectures. Open specifications, whether based on WS-* or REST, are at the heart of most cloud initiatives, making the cloud-based applications relatively easy to deploy and integrate.

While SOA and standards make development teams happy, the economics make the executive suite happy. The cloud is the classic pay-as-you-go model for information technology. You don’t need to buy servers or provision a data center; you don’t need to purchase licenses for Windows Server or Oracle. Instead, you get a monthly bill that’s keyed to the amount of network traffic or the number of gigabytes of storage. What could be simpler? What could be more affordable and cost-effective?

The power of the cloud also plays well with other 2008 trends. Smart mobile devices, like the Apple iPhone or RIM BlackBerry, or based on the Google Android stack, are connected to the Internet and can be very happy working with cloud-based applications. Rich Internet clients haven’t yet been tied to the cloud, but there's no doubt that Adobe’s AIR/Flex, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Sun’s JavaFX all have a natural affinity for the cloud.

What about the software development team? Like the cloud, they’re not only location-independent, but increasingly location-irrelevant. Whether you’re playing follow-the-Sun development with offices distributed across North America, Europe and Asia, or whether you’re just trying to save a few dollars by outsourcing, cloud-based development and test platforms are readily accessible.

Looking into 2009, expect to see the cloud continue to evolve as an attractive enterprise development platform and deployment target, as service providers address concerns about security, reliability, interoperability and data portability. While the cloud’s not going to replace the enterprise data center for years to come—if ever—there’s no doubt that it’s going to be an increasingly attractive option for many companies and many applications.

Engelbart got it right
It's hard to believe that the mouse is now 40 years old. Harder still is comprehending the age of the graphical user interface, also 40 as of last month. In the time between their initial conception and the arrival of 2008, microprocessors and the hardware they control have advanced at an exponential rate. Unfortunately, the mouse and GUI have not.

40 years on, and our editors were hard-pressed to come up with examples of innovative new user interfaces. Sure, someone hacked their MacBook motion sensor to scroll left and right when the screen is slapped on the corresponding side, and yes, there is work being done to give blind users better access through sound and touch-translation of on-screen content. But the fundamental mouse and pointer paradigm hasn't seen so much as a speed bump in the past 40 years.

Why is this? Perhaps because creating faster microprocessors is a relatively rote mathematical task, made easier by more powerful hardware tools for controlling robotic silicon engravers. Conversely, user interface engineering is a much squishier affair, involving psychology, ergonomics and logic. Run all those disciplines through the eye of the digital needle, and you have a recipe for using math to build out decidedly non-logical concepts.

Or perhaps the reason for so little innovation in GUI's is less sinister. Perhaps Engelbart and his team simply got it right the first time. Maybe the mouse-driven point-and-click interface is robust enough to accommodate us all for the rest of our lives.

Related Search Term(s): cloud computing, SOA, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Sun

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The year was tumultuous The big story was the problems with the economy, but beyond that, the software industry had its own twists and turns. Among the highlights was the strengthening of agile programming, the profitability of cloud computing and the continued enhancement of mobile devices.

Google, Salesforce cozy up on cloud services Force.com now works with Google App Engine thanks to a newly released Python library. App Engine applications can now read and write to data from Force.com, and the library allows access to Salesforce services through native calls to Salesforce's APIs.

Developers discuss ways to program in cloud environments Cloud computing is still a relatively new concept, and both small business and enterprises are looking into how to use it to their advantage. One of the biggest questions facing developers is whether or not to use proprietary cloud APIs.

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