One of my fellow Microsoft Regional Director recently gave me this link to a talk by David Chappell given in Dutch DevDays (of course the talk is in English, otherwise I would not have understood to repost here). A little history here – I first came to know about David Chappell from his legendary book Understanding ActiveX and OLE. Before this book (released in 1996) the more I read on Microsoft OLE from books like Inside COM and Inside OLE, the more I got confused (purely due to my lack of my experience with advanced C++). Instead Chappell’s book on the subject made OLE/COM approachable to every Software Engineer and finally I could understand it. Chappell followed this home run with his other book Understand .NET, which introduced and explained then the new .NET platform in the finest fashion.
Coming back to the subject of this post, so when I got this link to listen to David Chappell talking on Application Platform, I immediately spent the next 60 minutes on it. If you are involved with Application Platform in any manner then I recommend you see this video too.
In this video Chappell in brief goes through the history of Application Platform, why they came into being, the war between Microsoft and Java on dominating this trend and the current status in his view with Java world fragmenting. He then goes on to talk about why he thinks SOA (Software Oriented Application/Architecture) has failed in general – I concur on his observations that most of the time it is not about technology, it is about People, Power and Money. Traditionally in large businesses “Data” sharing between departments is achievable but “Application” sharing is just not practical and unfortunately that is what SOA vendors kept pushing. Finally he provides a model of cloud platform and an excellent comparison between the various vendor’s cloud offerings – Microsoft Azure, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, SalesForce, Oracle & IBM.
