Amen.

A big move in that direction: Rackspace cloud is based on OpenStack. Another large provider (not as big as Rackspace, of course), Interapp, has now announced they will be be offering cloud services based on OpenStack. In that market, it appears it makes no difference how much marketing one does: what works best (as defined by one's needs) will be picked.

Speaking of which: in the last few days I had to set up a web service which would ship simple JSON messages back and forth. I looked at all the alternatives, and wrote the crux of the server in (exactly) 16 lines of Python (using CherryPy), including configuation settings. Because CP has its own threaded WSGI web server built in, I didn't even have to set up a web server, create a virtual directory, convert it to an application, set up an application pool, etc. I suppose if it gets over a few hundred clients shipping a lot of messages back and forth I'll have to move it to Apache with mod python or something like that (or replace the WSGI engine in CP with GothicAlice's PEP-based WSGI implementation), but I doubt that time will some. And it's all so easy.

Yes, I could have done it all in .Net. And I could use a cutting torch to open a can of beans, too. Or I could use the hand-operated can opener in the kitchen.

Hank

PS: (I've been following the various "the times have changed" theads) I'm not sure about SQLite3 on one of the Blackberry systems, based on Rhomobile's experience (they do in fact sync everything with the cloud, but work locally). But other than that, there is no question that SQLite3 is the beast of local caching. The proof is in the pudding.



>>>Obviously it is something Microsoft is promoting heavily. I receive MSDN Magazine in the mail, as I'm sure you do, too, and it has been running endless articles about cloud computing lately.
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>These big vendors may not be telling their minions yet, but they know perfectly well that the next Microsoft will be one of the cloud providers. Which shows how corrupt IT has become. Imagine if hip replacement manufacturers sought to take over all the hospitals and started awarding surgical degrees to promote/compel sales of their products. There would be an outcry and surgeons would band together to punish the vendor who tried to coerce the market and dis-empower the professionals. Boy, we developers are wimps and look what we've allowed. In a real market, the profession would anoint its own experts and system manufacturers would compete for the business of cloud providers who would compete for customers who probably wouldn't care much about the tech at the other end as long as it works. Control of every level would be a dream.