Even though Apex Code has been a GA tool since last summer, it's still news to many prospective developers and even to many salesforce.com customers -- and when people first encounter the world's first language for a multi-tenant execution environment, I still get puzzled or even aggressive questions about why Yet Another Programming Language is needed. About a year ago, Peter Kastner (then at the Aberdeen Group) put that concern in canonical form with his comment that clients of his "like the idea of opening up the application to custom integration, but are perplexed over why salesforce is inventing a new scripting language when Perl, Ruby, and Javascript are already well understood by enterprise developers."

Among hard-core code cognoscenti, it's perhaps the conventional wisdom that Ruby, Perl, or some other prepended-P patois like Python or PHP  are today's "well understood" programming tools -- but "Little Tutorials" blogger Daniel Pietraru challenges that perception with his well-researched analysis of programming language success. He concludes, if I may summarize, that languages succeed when they combine familiar syntax, really good tools, and the prospect of enabling "earth shattering improvement in the life of...programmers and projects." Hello, world, meet Apex.

Viewed through Pietraru's perspective, Apex Code takes on new aspects. It's not a niche tool for a proprietary platform -- rather, it's a Java-like language  with an Eclipse-based tool ecosystem and excellent facilities for unleashing immense gains in developer productivity and enterprise project success.

It's no small thing to be a member of the C/C++/C#/Java family, syntax-wise. Pietraru estimates, from various independent metrics, that this family of languages accounts for roughly half of all programmer mindshare, while fascinating and powerful tools like Python, Ruby, Lisp/Scheme and Smalltalk have a combined share of less than 8 per cent. If someone claims to be a programmer, the odds of his or her being able to read Apex Code pretty much on sight -- and understand pretty well what the code is doing -- are considerably better than even.

It's likewise no small thing for a language and platform to be well served by Eclipse. Research released this month by Evans Data found an Eclipse-based development environment rising above respected and well-supported alternatives such as Microsoft's Visual Studio and Sun Microsystems' NetBeans. The Eclipse-based Force.com IDE is an attractive way to enter the cloud, as I discussed in a video interview (taped at our office overlooking Sydney's Darling Harbour) last autumn.

But does Apex Code pave the way to "earth shattering improvement"? Don't take my word for it: ask the developers at CODA plc about their better, faster and cheaper project delivery. Moreover, ask ZDNet blogger David Berlind about the abstraction power of Apex that led him to conclude, "staying with one of the other all purpose languages would probably have done very little to fix the lock-in problem [but] might have sacrificed some of the optimizations that empower developers to more quickly and easily harness the salesforce platform...salesforce.com ultimately made the right choice for itself as well as its customers."

Shunning Apex Code today, because of a perception that it's proprietary, would be as big a mistake as shunning Java would have been in 1996. As errors go, I'm not sure they get much bigger.

In a paper released this month as sample work from Springboard Research, I was struck by the comment that "Organizations will [likely] seek a mix of options when it comes to software hosting... Even the most vocal SaaS providers, Google and Salesforce, have tacitly acknowledged that online presence is not possible for users at all times and have begun delivering offline variants of their applications."

I felt impelled -- or even compelled -- to challenge some of the assumptions that seem to be built into this statement.

• First, I find that it's ever more irrelevant to have a computer even turned on if it has no working Internet link. At this point, about the only things I can usefully do without a live feed are simple proofreading, image editing, or condensation of a presentation or a document down to a smaller size for use in a different setting. If I'm actually generating any new work, or taking any meaningful action, I need to be on line. Music composers and pure mathematicians are likely to disagree, but they're not the mainstream market.
• Second, I find that the number of places where I'm not on line is rapidly shrinking. I recently acquired an iPod Touch, and find that one of its most useful functions is as a pocket-size full-screen Wi-Fi sniffer. I find that if I'm not particular about briefly borrowing some bit-rate from an open access point, we live in a really packetful world -- and without much effort at all, I can even be fully legitimate almost anywhere.
• Third, I feel as if it's sort of inside-out to talk about being disconnected in terms of whether you do or don't have live Net access. I feel a whole lot more disconnected when there's something I need, right now, but it's on a particular laptop or desktop hard drive and I'm not in the same room as that particular machine. I'm getting ever more conservative about keeping things on a memory stick, or on a portable hard drive, or -- best option -- somewhere in a well-secured slice of the cloud where I can use it anywhere, anytime.

Finally and most generally, it's not the problem of any single technology provider (or even any particular subset of the tech provider ecosystem) to solve the problem of staying up and running even if your public network link is intermittent. Google Gears, Adobe AIR, and any number of solutions yet to emerge are narrowing the gap between reality and full-speed always-on -- and in a standards-based community, everyone gets better together. That's the kind of connection that benefits us all.

Once again, it will be my privilege to keynote what's become the annual June session on entrepreneurial opportunities in software at the Caltech/MIT Enterprise Forum. This year's topic, Betting Your Company On An Internet Platform?, was not actually defined by me -- but I couldn't have picked a subject that gets me more interested in sharing my thoughts, and participating in the moderated panel discussion that will follow my remarks on the morning of Saturday, June 14.

If you're anywhere in the very broad Los Angeles area, I assure you that an early Saturday morning drive to Pasadena will redefine your expectations for how quickly the freeways can get you somewhere. Please join us (sorry, the event is not free, but it's cheap for full-time students) at 8 a.m. for continental breakfast outside the lecture hall.

If you know you're coming, and I can put together a group of reasonable size, an insider's tour of some of the facilities at nearby JPL is also a possibility, so please leave a comment here if you'd be interested: we'll see if it can be made to happen.

In the past six weeks, I've had some unique opportunities to meet with CIOs and developers in Los Angeles, Newport Beach, Shanghai, Sydney, Palo Alto, London, Melbourne and Sydney. No, that's not an accidental duplication, there really were two trips to Sydney in just a three-week slice from that period -- but in all those places, no matter how often I visit, I still meet people who are getting their first introduction to the possibilities of PaaS.

On a short intra-Oz hop yesterday, I found myself sitting across an airplane aisle from a principal of a salesforce.com partner company: someone whom I'd first met, and briefed on PaaS, last fall. He put the power of prompt project delivery on Force.com into very concrete terms.

"I tell my clients, 'I'll never make a proposal to you that costs more than $100,000 or takes more than 90 days,'" he said. "I tell them, 'Over the course of two years, we might do a million dollars' worth of business together, but I'll never pitch a project to you that involves your spending a million dollars on something that takes two years to deliver.' I tell them, 'In 30 days I'll bring you something that does a lot of what you need -- and then you'll get some new ideas about what you want. Over the next 30 days, I'll make those changes -- and for the last 30 days, you'll actually be using the application, and we'll just be fine-tuning.'"

He told me that new clients find this a startling change from the process they've learned to tolerate. It's quite a dramatic shift from the old approach of having an application specified, storyboarded, prototyped, and finally delivered in a disappointing version 1.0 after a discouraging delay -- to be followed by a bunch of finger-pointing as to whether the fundamental flaws are in the statement of requirements, or in their fulfillment by the development team.

It's an enormous change to have the actual users of the application tightly engaged in polishing the product in what amounts to real time, and seeing that the effort they make to clarify their needs is rewarded with prompt and effective payback.

As we put the final pieces into the architecture and the ecosystem of PaaS, I see no reason why the 90-day wonder should not become an expectation rather than a surprise.

The Tour de Force events across the globe continue to draw great attendance and interest from developers looking to build new SaaS applications. The event is yet to make its way to India but I have been traveling across India (Pune & Bangalore) meeting with partners, educating them about Force.com and Platform as a Service generally – and the response has been tremendously positive. At one of our partners in Pune, I delivered an hour long session on PaaS and Force.com – and the result was a lot of very interesting questions and interest in this paradigm shift. A similar event in Bangalore with over 100 attendees drew a similar response.

India is Ready

There was genuine appreciation about how difficult and wasteful it is to currently build, deploy and manage software applications. This is especially true for IT outsourcing firms that month after month see ISVs and IT departments of large enterprise burn time and money on infrastructure and platform, delaying and risking delivering business value to the end users.

Across Generations

India is a country of young people – over 50% of India’s population is under 25. And presenting to various audiences – I couldn’t help but wonder how many in the audience can even remember what computing without connectivity was like. The shift from client-server to SaaS comes naturally to this generation.

More interestingly, the senior executives and technology gurus – some that wrote compilers in 1980s by hand – were even more excited about this shift. The questions and discussions revolved around how to navigate this shift and understanding the new evolving SaaS ecosystems and not whether the shift is underway. 

Here is a sampling of questions:

Is There a Whitepaper on SaaS?

Yes, we do have whitepapers on SaaS and PaaS. However, whitepapers are so 90s – I encouraged our audience to learn through building and engagement with the community – blogs, online forums, how-to wiki’s, informational videos. 

What Kind of Applications Can I Build on PaaS?

Even as salesforce.com started out as a CRM company, the Force.com platform is being used by our customers and partners to build out applications that cover wide variety of solutions be it Finance and Accounting (Coda), Risk Management (Riskonnect), Life Sciences (Verticals OnDemand) and many others. Business Applications that are data and process driven is where Force.com provides the most value today

What about Security?

No one asked this question – so I thought I will mention it. This question that resulted from both genuine apprehensions and FUD created by certain vendors that did not have SaaS capabilities is increasingly becoming a non-issue. I think there are two reasons for this: First, as customers use more and more SaaS applications their experience invalidates the concerns. Second, initiatives such as trust.salesforce.com that educate and inform have re-assured the community of users, developers and investors. 

Really?

Yes, this question was asked a few times. For example, when I explained that Force.com is multi-tenant not just for our direct customers but also for all applications written by end users and partners – and that everyone is on the latest version of the software. The response is: Really? 

Salesforce.com’s success with the platform in releasing as many as 25 major releases in last 8 years – and comparing that to once in 3 to 7 years cycle for legacy software vendors also draws a: Really?

So yes, really!

The proof is in the pudding – you are welcome to get a free developer login and build an app.