Developer Christmas Countdown - December 13 - T minus 12 days

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December 13 - Cloud Computing Development Questions, End of Year Reminders

12 Days until Christmas.  18 days until the New Year's Eve.  Decorations have gone up here in our Scotts Valley Office.  On Wednesday and Thursday I will transform myself into Santa Claus for our parties at our two main California offices.  I am having a great time building DataSnap server applications and hosting them on Amazon's EC2 elastic server infrastructure.  RAD Studio XE makes it so easy to quickly build native and managed code servers that you can deploy to Amazon and other cloud systems.

Developing Applications for the Cloud

I am working on an article about developing applications for the "Cloud" (Public, Hybrid and Private).  Today, using RAD Studio XE (Delphi XE, C++Builder XE, Delphi Prism XE and RadPHP XE) you can build server and web applications and place them in a cloud infrastructure like Amazon EC2.  You can use Delphi XE and C++Builder XE to create applications that use Microsoft Azure's Tables, Blogs and Message storage (using components and the Azure API).  I have an active EC2 Windows MicroInstance running a Delphi DataSnap XE REST Server.  You can use your browser to check out our FishFact DataSnap REST server demo application at http://46.51.184.2:8089/.

For an upcoming Cloud application development article, I have put together a starting list of questions that developers should ask themselves before starting cloud development.  You'll find my starting list below.  If you have additional questions you are asking yourself, I'd love to have you post a comment to this blog entry.  Thanks and happy holidays to everyone.

Cloud Application Development Questions:

  • Which Cloud architectures, storage and infrastructure including Google AppEngine, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Engineyard, private clouds, etc. should developers consider using in their development projects?

  • Do cloud applications need SQL or NonSQL databases, or can cloud applications just be line of business objects?

  • What application/project situations are ideal for cloud development and which are not? Should you build server applications or web applications for the cloud – is there a difference?

  • What pitfalls/opportunities should developers be aware of when developing for the cloud?

  • Should you use native or managed code for your cloud application development?

  • What is the best way to quickly build cloud application servers with native performance?

  • How can you make sure your cloud applications scale? What API(s) and best practices are available to help with scaling?

  • What must be done to secure cloud applications (that you develop) so that they work in multi-tenancy environments?

  • Will a cloud deployment compromise my ability to meet regulatory mandates?

  • What security standards or best practices should you require as part of using a cloud provider?

  • What tools are required to build and test your cloud based applications – unit test, system test, load test, performance profiling, database profiling?

  • Should developers consider specific application stacks when starting a cloud application project?

  • What type of monitoring do you need to build for your cloud applications or should you just use the monitoring provided by your Cloud provider?


End of Year Special Offers Reminder

We're quickly counting down the days till Christmas and also to the end of the year when all of our special promotions will run out. Don't miss your chance for some real savings in the next 18 days. Check out all of the promotions at

Recent CodeRage 5 Sessions focused on DataSnap XE and Cloud Application Development

You will find all of the CodeRage 5 session replays (to watch and download) listed at http://www.embarcadero.com/coderage5/sessions
Tags: Amazon EC2 C++Builder Cloud Computing CodeRage DataSnap Delphi JSON Microsoft Azure Prism RAD Studio RadPHP REST

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About
Gold User, Rank: 1, Points: 2466
David Intersimone (known to many as David I.) is a passionate and innovative software industry veteran-often referred to as a developer icon-who extols and educates the world on Embarcadero developer tools. He shares his visions as an active member of the industry speaking circuit and is tapped as an expert source by the media. He is a long-standing champion of architects, developers and database professionals and works to ensure that their needs are folded into Embarcadero's strategic product plans. David holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, California.

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