Cloud Converter(???????????)??????????????????????????(??????????)??????
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I just posted Cloud Converter to Google code. It’s a bunch of Java code that:
** connects to a dirt bound database you specify — anything with a JDBC connector should work (MySQL, Lotus Notes, Microsoft SQL, Oracle)
** inspects the meta data
** creates a matching object in Force.com
** modifies the default page layout to include all of the fields and creates a custom tab for it
** moves data from the dirt to the cloud
Pretty straightforward. The "ReadMe.txt" gives more detail. I’ll be putting together a screen flow shortly. Questions? Drop me an email: rcarlberg@modelmetrics.com.
Model Metrics has released this as open source with an MIT License.
Enjoy!
1/7 Update: This is now on Salesforce.com’s Code Share.
Cloudware — used as early as 2007 to refer to things like Google Maps, normal people will start saying it this year to refer to just about everything.
"AWS It" — putting something on AWS’s S3, EC2 or Turk instead of going the dirt computing route.
Web 11.0 — someone will surely co-opt this meaningless string of syllables in a vain attempt to lend it real significance. Won’t be dull enough to be widely used until mid 2010. But seriously: I had to go all that way to Web 11.0 to find one that wasn’t in some degree of use. Check this out: formal definitions for Web 1.0 through Web 8.0.
"He’s an Abe"* — that
guy — you know the one — who keeps arguing that you need to keep data on a server in house and that you can’t really deal with the downtime imposed by an external service provider’s schedule maintenance window.**
Pie — OK, that’s not PaaS / SaaS or otherwise buzzworthy. I just like pie. 
Any you’d like to contribute? Feel free in comments.
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* Estimated time until we get a cease and desist or whatever on the image above? 9 minutes. Special thanks to Josh Birk for finding the image.
** Cause you know in house servers never go down.
It’s the time of year for predictions. Everyone has their prognostication hat on. My thoughts? We’ll need a buzzword for all those servers we’re killing. It should be slightly negative.
I call dibs on "dirt computing".
From what I can tell, 2009 is not likely to be a good year for dirt computing.
Note – Screen shots for Blackberry and iPhone below.
Dreamforce ’08 has come and gone. We had a couple of nice mentions — Lasso2Go of course but we also had the DFMobile application. Hit http://dfmobile.force.com from your mobile device if you’d like to see it. It works on a Blackberry, a WAP/ simple XHTML compatible device or an iPhone.
The use case: you’re a Dreamforce 08 attendee and you want to find out about the event from your phone. And if you’ve already registered on the Dreamforce portal, you can access the schedule you built there on your mobile device. You can search partners and sessions, find out more information about the Foo Fighters and local watering holes, and a whole lot more.*
The basic system is pretty straightforward. Some details:
There were a few other features that didn’t quite make it to production. For example, we created a way to highlight the particular room a session was in on the iPhone client. And to be clear, this is used a single image that the iPhone highlighted based on coordinates in the object. The only reason it didn’t make it to production was the timing of go-live.
For the iPhone developers out there, this is using the CiUI library from CNET. Over all, CiUI was pretty serviceable. The only thing that came up occassionally was an odd timing issue related to how fast CiUI could respond to user input. Sometimes, during testing, the javascript that replaces the body of a page would get out of synch with the results coming back from SFDC. The page would then display without the decorative wrapper containing the header, footer and CSS. Note: this apears to have only been an issue in artificial rapid fite tesing, not in production, and wasn’t an issue related to Force.com response times.
The biggest lesson learned? Getting the permissions aligned between the custom object, customer portal and Force.com sites takes a minute to get used to. If something isn’t checked, your application will appear unresponsive. If your app appears unresponsive, chances are good that it’s related to permissions.
A pretty exciting project all in all.
Blackberry Screenshots
Blackberry Main Screen (WAP/Simple XHTML)
Blackberry Session Search Form
Blackberry Session Search Results
iPhone Splash Screen
iPhone Main Menu
iPhone, post login, My Sessions > Tuesday view
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* OK, well, not a whole lot more, but some more. Check it out on the
Attended SFDC’s Cloudforce in NYC today. It was at The Pierre — a pretty nice hotel. Two digressions to get out of the way: love the new Tommy Bahama shirts, was not a big fan of the chicken salad sandwiches.
Mr. Benioff & crew did their job. Highlights:
One person came out of the keynote and said, "I didn’t get it. But I can tell you the last thing I want to buy right now is a server." (Michael Dell should meet him.)
Another, "I advise a national non-profit. They keep wanting to build infrastructure. I keep telling them not to and now I have more alternatives."
And my favorite, when I explained Lasso2Go and the whole Force.com Sites + Amazon AWS connection, "You can do that?" Yes.
Pretty good day. And a side note on Lasso. Today is the first day I’ve used it in ernest. It’s pretty cool. I used it to capture every business card someone handed me.
And where you might ask does Alec Baldwin come in? He was talking on a phone outside of Topaz, a Thai place we stopped at (get the Drunken Chicken —- AWESOME). We — OK, I — gawked.
Heading to Cloudforce in NYC? So am I. We’ll be talking about some of the standard stuff as well as one supercool addition. You should definitely stop by our booth (I think it’s a booth — might be a table — either way stop by) and ask for a demo. I’ll be there all day.
So Dan Galorath has noticed Force.com and started to quantify the savings he believes users can achieve with it. It looks like Marc Benioff sent the results around to all of SFDC. With good reason – Galorath estimates 30-40% lower costs when compared to Java.
Very cool. And consistent with my experience.
In an explanatory article, How Galorath Quantified the Salesforce.com Platform, there are a couple of interesting nuggets hidden all the way at the bottom:
"For applications that are consistent with the built in capabilities of the SalesForce.com Platform, there appears to be about an 80% reduction in the actual development effort. Because of the ability to create with point-and-click operations to support prototyping, the requirements and design effort is reduced with estimates ranging from 10% to 25%."
You read that right: 80% reduction in development effort. Wow.
And, since I’m a nitpicker, I’m going to pick on one thing. Galorath writes:
"APEX does not provide UI services or support external web service calls, the primary focus is to provide data oriented transactional services – more like Stored Procedures in Oracle or SQL Server."
The web services call issue is just incorrect. APEX absolutely supports those. And the UI services section — I think this is splitting hairs. APEX doesn’t, but Visualforce does.
Oh and since I’m really a nitpicker, it’s not "SalesForce.com" with a capital "F". It’s lower case. C’mon people.
Glad to see Force.com getting some good formal attention. Now if we could just get some Z notation animators for it.
So it’s post Dreamforce 08 — awesome. Love DF, love getting home from DF.
On the flight, I noticed something interesting: if you cruise into Eclipse, the plugins directory, where you have the Force.com IDE, you’ll see a "com.salesforce.ide.documentation.[a bunch of numbers]". If you look in there, you’ll see a directory called "platform_labs", and if you look in there you’ll see a fair amount of info re: Force.com Sites.
All of which was released on 10/27/2008, several days before THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT.
Note to self: look for hidden goodies in the next release of the IDE.
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