Answers to some VMforce questions
by Jesper Joergensen on May 13, 2010 at 08:45 AM
It's been a few weeks since the VMforce announcement and it's been great to follow the many comments and posts both before and after we announced what VMforce is about.
Mike Leach posted this one with a couple of questions shortly after the event and it was followed up by this one by Joel Dietz with some additional thoughts and questions. I'll try to answer some of those questions here:
"Are there any debugging improvements when using VMForce relative to Apex/VF?"
One of the design goals with VMforce is to get out of the way of the developer and let you write code the way you normally do (to the largest extent possible). In many cases you'll be able to develop most of your application locally and use your local debugging tool. When you deploy to VMforce, it will be a little harder to allow you to attach a debugger, but we're looking at ways to enable "cloud" debugging as well. Our current thinking is that local debugging will go a long way to address debugging needs.
As you develop locally, you can, in theory also use a local database, but we expect most developers use a developer org/sandbox during local development.
"The connection between VMWare and Salesforce is presumably via webservices and not natively hosted in the same datacenter. Does this imply some performance and latency tradeoffs when using VMForce?"
VMforce is a single service offered jointly by VMware and Salesforce.com and the Java applications will be hosted in the same data center as the database. However, VMforce applications should definitely be optimized for minimal database roundtrips since they are loosely coupled and physically separated from the database. This is no different from many other multi-tier application architectures in use today.
"Licencing: Single biller?"
VMforce is a single service and customers will not be billed separately by VMware and Salesforce for its use.
"Will Salesforce limit the types and numbers of native objects that can be serialized through VMForce?"
There are already limits on this today and we will evaluate and update those limits if necessary to accommodate VMforce use cases.
"Why only the teaser?"
We think it was important to say what we're going to do, but we still have some work to get there. Apologize for not being able to give you something to play with right now, but we're working on it.
"Pricing Model"
Stay tuned for more info. But I do want to make one comment to Joel Dietz' point:
Amazon is not PaaS, so it's a bad choice for pricing model comparison. Google doesn't offer close to as rich a feature set (if you think about everything you can do on Force.com, not just VMforce) so they are not a good comparison either."...the obvious answer for developers working off of PaaS is resource based pricing, which is clear and transparent in the case of Google and Amazon, but a bit murkier in the case of Salesforce."
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Comments
Posted by Wes on May 13, 2010 09:05 AM:
Sounds good, I'm sure VMforce will be a very big seller and I'm looking forward to it.
I was wondering which features do you see Force.com offering that Google doesn't? I enjoy both technologies and Force.com is still my favoured platform but I think they are comparable (obviously).
Posted by Mike Leach on May 13, 2010 09:11 AM:
Great post Jesper. Thanks for the info.
Any early indication now if VMForce apps will be published on the AppExchange?
Posted by Jesper Joergensen on May 13, 2010 09:15 AM:
How about search, reporting, dashboards and pretty much every type of declarative customization you can do on top of your data in Force.com?
Mike: No timeline yet. Stay tuned.
Posted by Wes on May 13, 2010 09:30 AM:
Very true, declarative programming is not part of Google's offering but the feature set is still there.
Search: http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/
Reporting: http://code.google.com/p/g2-report-engine/wiki/AppEngineSupport
Dashboard: http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/documentation/gallery.html
Simplicity with Force.com is unparalleled, I don't argue that point.
Posted by Robcheng on May 13, 2010 10:41 AM:
@Wes, BigTable is a non-relational datastore without a schema, so your GAE apps are responsible for managing domain and referential integrity themselves, and things like triggers can be a challenge. It's true that projects like datastorex have sprung up to try and provide these features, but it's not clear when (or if) those projects will really be ready for prime-time, business-critical deployments.
Posted by Chirag Mehta on May 13, 2010 10:52 AM:
waiting to be VMwar'ized ...
Posted by Joel Dietz / d3developer on May 13, 2010 11:52 AM:
Thanks for the detailed response Jesper!
In my defense, I think it is a bit unclear where IaaS ends and Paas begins (see this ZDNet article, for instance, http://bit.ly/bHl0wn) and even though I completely agree that the feature set here in the Force.com world is very well developed it is easy to hit a hard limit that inhibits future development.
If some of these hard limits were relaxed in favor of the more flexible approach offered on the Google App Engine this would also encourage folks to build / transition larger apps in the Force.com cloud instead of the plethora of smaller apps that currently exist.
In summary, even if Google's feature set isn't as well developed at this point, it is moving in that direction and it is hard to see the AppExchange keeping ahead of their Marketplace without adopting some of their good ideas ;)
Exciting times!
Posted by Jesper Joergensen on May 13, 2010 11:55 AM:
Absolutely agree. It's great to see Google advance their platform and we will definitely look at other platforms out there (not only Google's) to help us make our own platform better.
Posted by Wes on May 13, 2010 12:36 PM:
Yeah the bigtable table thing is a large issue (not the only one either), and Google's platform is a toddler to Salesforce's teenager.
The next year or so is going to be very exciting, and with VMforce Salesforce is stepping into the arena with some of the giants in software creation. I'm sure there'll be some David-and-Goliath situations, but I suspect most of the time developers will use one platform to support or augment another.
Posted by Todd on May 21, 2010 09:07 AM:
Something totally unclear to me is where the front end fits in. I understand that through JPA, custom objects will be created and thus we could use page layouts and/or VF pages to get at that data.
But will VF be able to reference our VMForce Java methods? Or is the expectation that we will use our favorite servlet tool to generate a front end to our Java/VMWare service layer?
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