My blog has been rather quiet over the past couple of months and for good reason. I'm working on a project on the east coast and a project on the west coast, Wes and I are finishing up our Salesforce Handbook (we are currently having printing issues with the publisher) and I've been working with one of my favorite new Salesforce.com Developer Evangelists,Sandeep Bhanot, on my Facebook Toolkit app and preso for our Dreamforce 10 session "Leveraging Public Social Networks" (Wed 12/8 @ 12:15pm).
I finally got the approval yesterday to make the announcement that I'll also be presenting a VMforce app in the session "VMforce: The Trusted Enterprise Platform as a Service" (Wed 12/8 @ 1:45pm). I've been working with Salesforce.com and VMware for the last couple of months trying to put together a cool demo of an existing on-premise Java app to show how easy it is to move apps to the cloud.
I use<a href="http://www.springsource.com/developer/sts"target="_blank">Spring STS</a> and <a href="http://www.springsource.org/roo"target="_blank">Spring Roo</a> to build and test my apps locally before deploying them (with one click!) to the cloud. The app uses the Spring 3 framework with standard POJOs, JSPs and Servlets just like any other Java app. The best part is that whether running locally or in the cloud, I have the same access to the Force.com Database, analytics and collaboration with Chatter. I also love the fact that I don't have to worry about my server stack, maintaining app server configurations or software to install or patch!
Based upon what I've seen in the alpha program and the progress that's being made, I think VMforce is going to be an incredible way for enterprise Java developers to run their applications in the cloud.
