ReadWriteCloud

If your business is producing Web sites, then it's all too easy to assume that the way you innovate is by producing bigger, broader, more content.  When you consider the platform as something that exists only on the client side - where the customer determines the scheme and not you - any functionality you create becomes a slave to the browser, the runtime and the operating system. And your business model maintains its 1995 profile. Standards attempt to ameliorate this dilemma, but as the HTML5 process demonstrates, such attempts may last decades.

If you're an applications developer, then your business is to deliver service. In that case, you have a life-altering choice to make: Do you deliver all your functionality to your client and count on it to be executed there in its entirety, or do you let some or all of it be executed on a server in what your customers are calling the "cloud"?

Most people think of Autodesk as the maker of AutoCAD, the design software of choice for architects, engineers and other design professionals - typically running on high-powered workstations. So why is Autodesk CEO Carl Bass so hung up on the "democratization" of technology - spreading technology to the cloud computing platforms and mobile devices?

At the company's media summit in San Francisco this morning, Bass told a crowd of journalists, analysts and customers gathered in the company's slick design gallery (see pictures below) that the combination of mobile devices, cloud computing and social collaboration is more profound than the shift to PCs.

Heroku has added a data clips feature to its Heroku Postgres databases. What's that, you ask? According Heroku's Matthew Soldo, data clips are a "convenient way to share data inside a database."

Basically, the feature lets users of Heroku Postgres share a result of a SQL query via a URL. The results can be viewed in the browser, or downloaded in several standard formats.

In PaaS Makes Progress in 2011, I argued that the previous 12 months had been pivotal to the advancement of platform-as-a-service. As a result of this fast-paced evolution, the PaaS of 2012 is quite a different beast than that of just a couple of years ago. While this second-generation PaaS differs in many ways from initial forays in the field, one of the most important distinctions is that this new PaaS has been disintegrated, or at least made more modular.

While Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) has always had its cheerleaders - yours truly included - the harsh reality is that, commercially speaking, PaaS offerings have underperformed relative to expectations for several years running. This is particularly the case among enterprises, which have, by and large, turned a blind eye to the technology.

Little bit of news around Node.js today, Amazon has added support for Identity Federation, and Oracle customers might want to pay attention to a fundamental flaw that's been discovered in Oracle database systems.

Node.js v0.6.8 – The Node.js team has released a new stable version, 0.6.8. This release updates V8 to 3.6.6.19, updates npm to 1.1.0-2, and fixes a number of bugs.

To abuse the cloud metaphor, there's a storm brewing over public and private clouds. Not surprisingly, providers of public clouds (who hope to see everybody move their computing to public clouds) are quick to dismiss private clouds. One of the best reads today is from the ActiveState blog, where Bart Copeland takes on the idea that private clouds are "vapor." Also, OpenStack's usage accounting system is coming into shape and why you can't live migrate VMs between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2 to 6.1.

If you’re using WordPress, the options you are mostly likely to use are to run your own stack, use a shared hosting provider that offers WordPress or to go with WordPress.com. With the rise of PaaS offerings like OpenShift, though, why not run WordPress there?

As it stands, most PaaS providers are largely targeted at custom code rather than packages like WordPress. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get WordPress up and running, as Amit Shah demonstrated by moving his WordPress blog to OpenShift.

Here's an interesting post from ActiveState's Jan Dubois on running Bugzilla on their Stackato PaaS. It's not a quite as simple as running on your own server, but Dubois does a good job of explaining the steps.

The process Dubois outlines includes:

Google is hoping to entice a few developers over to Google App Engine (GAE) by providing a ticket tracker that runs on GAE for developers to study and test out.

Called Au-to-do, it's written in Python and uses Google Cloud Storage, the Prediction API, Tasks API and OAuth 2.