Cloud

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting Practicing Continuous Delivery on the Cloud at the Atlanta No Fluff Just Stuff conference. Here is the session description:

This session will teach you best practices and patterns for doing Continuous Delivery / Continuous Deployment in Cloud environments. You will learn how to handle schema migrations, maintain dev/prod parity, manage configuration and scaling. This session will use Heroku as an example platform but the patterns could be implemented anywhere.

Here is a quick screencast that shows how to instantly deploy Java web applications on the cloud with Heroku.

If you want more than a quick introduction check out a recording of my presentation at JavaZone. And visit heroku.com/java for more details on how to get started running Java apps on Heroku.

I’m very excited to be presenting at Dreamforce (salesforce.com’s anual conference) this year! On Thursday, September 1, from 1:15 pm to 2:15 pm I will be presenting:

Developing Java Cloud Apps

The cloud makes it easy to deploy highly scalable apps in an instant. This session will walk you through the steps to build your first Java app for the cloud. You’ll also learn best practices for building mission-critical and horizontally scalable Java cloud apps.

You’ve heard it said that “all things old are new again.” That statement can certainly be applied to the current Cloud hype. But each time the old becomes new it gets a bit better because of what was learned the last time around. If we look back ten years at enterprise application development in Java things were quite different than they are today. EJB was “the way” to build scalable systems from a vast abundance of components. But things didn’t work out as well as the vendors planned.

In my new job at salesforce.com I’m incredibly exited about getting into Heroku, a Platform as a Service provider / Cloud Application Platform. In a future blog post I’ll provide more details on what Heroku is and how it works. But if you are like me the first thing you want to do when learning a new technology is to take it for a test drive. I decided to take my Heroku test drive using the recently announced Node.js support. I’m new to Node.js, but at least I know JavaScript. Heroku also offers Ruby / Rails support but I don’t know Ruby - yet. So let me walk you through the steps I took (and that you can follow) to get started with Node.js on the Heroku Cloud.

When I started doing professional software development almost 15 years ago I was focused on the server-side. I started with Perl / CGI web apps - some of which are still in production today. Then I dove into Java web development with Java Web Server 1.0, Struts, JBoss, Tomcat and many other game changing technologies.

In 2004 I started getting into Macromedia Flex. I was amazed at how easy it was to retrieve and nicely render data from a Java back-end. In 2005 I began evangelizing Flex + Java. Following the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe, Flex has really flourished. Adobe Flex is now the dominant RIA technology and it has been so fun to be a part of that!

I’ll be speaking at Dreamforce again this year! I have two sessions that are going to be super fun! First is a panel called “Cloud Mobility: Taking Critical Business Functions With You, Whenever, Wherever” on Wednesday at 3:15 PM. Then on Thursday at 11am I’ll be co-presenting a session on “Building Rich User Interfaces with Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com” with Markus Spohn from Salesforce.com.

Preceding Dreamforce is the Cloudstock event where you can see some other great presentations related to Flex and RIAs. Lee Brimelow will be doing a presentation on “Flex and Flash Platform on the Cloud” that is guaranteed to entertain and educate. There will also be presentations from Nigel Pegg on Real-time Apps and Keith Sutton on “Adobe’s Cloud Offerings for Developers and Enterprises”.

I will co-presenting a free webinar tomorrow (September 28th, 2010) on building Client/Cloud Apps with Flex and Force.com. There are two times you can choose from:

• September 28, 2010 | 6:00 a.m. PDT | 2:00 p.m. GMT | 6:30 p.m. IST
• September 28, 2010 | 10:00 a.m. PDT

This session will walk through how you can get started building applications for the web, desktop, and mobile devices using Flex and Force.com. Salesforce.com and Adobe have worked together on an extension to the Flash Builder tool which enables developers to quickly build applications on top of the Force.com Cloud platform. I hope you can join me tomorrow! Sign up now!

Salesforce.com is putting on a great event on August 25 in San Mateo, California where you can learn about how to build RIAs on the Cloud with Flash Builder for Force.com. This will be a great opportunity to meet the team that built the tool and learn how to use it! If you can’t make it then check out the article I recently published “Building Client / Cloud Apps with Flash Builder for Force.com”. But if you are in the Bay Area and want to get up to speed quickly on building Client / Cloud apps then Register Now!

I have a theory. The majority of people who use enterprise software today use old school Client / Server apps. We’ve been trying to move these apps to the web for more than ten years. The ease of deployment of web apps is a clear motivator. Yet the client capabilities of the plain old web browser have not been sufficient for many apps to make the leap. This is why I love Flex and the Flash Platform. It provides a way to use web technologies and the web deployment model but adds many of the critical things needed for mission critical apps that people use all day long.