Cloud computing is a new (circa late 2007) label for the subset of grid computing that includes utility computing and other approaches to the use of shared computing resources. Cloud computing is an alternative to having local servers or personal devices handling users’ applications. Essentially, it is an idea that the technological capabilities should "hover" over everything and be available whenever a user wants.
Applications will soon head to the clouds in mass numbers. What does that mean? When you have a web applications all of these other responsibilities come with running the application you have to set the database up run a server language, integrate some monitoring or log reading system, select a Server Operating system and platform like IIS or Apache, LAMP or Windows, etc.. Then you have to deal with crowds of people coming onto your site and constantly using it and soon you will find yourself in a bind. You need to upgrade the server language, upgrade the database, migrate to a better hosting platform etc.. So you ask yourself what is wrong with this picture? Well I will tell you it sucks every time you need to migrate or upgrade a system because if you?re like me you also want to test things out before you hit the button. Well let?s just pretend for a second you could host your application on something that is more cost effective, has an uptime of 99.999 percent of uptime, enables you to vpn on the system, has excellent web services that were created for cloud computing and enables you to run any server language. This may seem farfetched and way off into the future but really it is not. Just take a look at Amazons Web Services it literally allows you to do all of the above. You can expand and contract your applications with ease. So ok that?s one provider who else is in on the game? Well Google will soon rev up their App Engine for flight and if you haven?t signed up to be a part of this service I would suggest doing so soon! I have a feeling Microsoft will not be too far off as well. I hope Google will also support more languages like Amazon has and I am sure they will. Recently I did bash Silverlight from Microsoft. After studying it more I do like some of its capabilities one thing I like is the fact you can use the DLR of the .NET platform! I believe Microsoft will be sharing more tricks with others in the near future which is of course good. I am also excited about the Mono platform. I do enjoy programming in Visual Studio 2008 it is an excellent Integrated Development Environment and C# has many advantages over other programming languages. One thing that is important to me is that my applications be operating system agnostic; they should simply just work on any machine they shouldn?t have to be programmed for a specific operating system. You can count on one thing in the future and that is change. So why not make applications that work truly anywhere on anything? While I do like and enjoy Vista I also have a beefy box that runs it and it does help to have an MSDN license so you can run whatever Microsoft technology you want of course not everyone has this advantage. I also run OS X and Linux at home. So it is nice when I can see my applications working in a predictable manner on everyone of my machines it leads me to believe it might be the same for the user. I have been real busy preparing for our Wedding and I have also kept up the work on iHang10.com! Check out some of the new features I recently added a Home Foreclosure and some other interesting map tricks! Really with iHang10.com I am simply coding something I want to use every day! Oh and this site will soon be upgraded to Drupal 6.2 so it will be going threw changes as soon as sunday.
Projects of interest:
Balder
WOW-engine
PureMVC
SWX
PopFly
Dapper
OpenKapow
Smile 
mule
Books I have been reading lately:
Professional ASP.NET Web Services
Spidering Hacks
Webbots, Spiders, and Screen Scrapers: A Guide to Developing Internet Agents with PHP/CURL
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