Saturday 6 December 2008

Delphi in the Cloud, Virtualization and other new inventions

Buzzwords change all the time, and the newest is the Cloud. The cloud provides several benefits: deployment, load balancing and costs improve a lot. Where does this put Delphi?

What we see now is the first generation of cloud systems. Some clouds have specific programming languages, very specific APIs and even specific databases which are rather primitive. As a former technical responsible for a webhotel, I can certainly understand why they don't introduce full SQL support from the start. However, as time goes, things becomes more feature-rich. We will see more support for SQL, more support for various programming languages, and maybe even support for virtual machines in clouds. It will be possible to create a virtual machine and put it into the cloud, replicated as many times as necessary.

Delphi/Win32 is very much about GUI client creation. It does not need a cloud, but it connects easily to a cloud. Even the Windows Azure client technologies are directly available in Win32.

Delphi Prism works with Microsoft Cloud technologies, but basically works with any mono-compatible cloud technology.

The only thing that is missing in this piece, is a good super-scalable cloud database that treats transactions just like Firebird does. Delphi has a good history of being able to handle many kinds of database semantics, and therefore works very well with almost any type of database in the cloud. However, the age-old problem of distributed transactions has not been solved with the cloud, and therefore we will still see many apps with centralized databases.

The current state in many organizations is, that they're trying to consolidate and virtualize. The cloud is nowhere near reality in most organizations yet, and we will see a lot of improvement in Cloud technology before it becomes mainstream in business.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Afaik, Jim Starkey (creator of InterBase) left MySQL recently to start a new "Cloud Database" product called Nimbus.

Anonymous said...

We created a new application in Delphi called Nefsis that is a massive cloud application,
http://www.nefsis.com

It uses cloud technology to distribute the video conferencing experience and the UI is entirely Delphi. It's probably one of the first cloud applications with a Delphi front-end and parial Delphi backend for the cloud pieces.

Lars D said...

The same link, but clickable: http://www.nefsis.com

SKamradt said...

The concept of a cloud database is quite interesting, but in the end its all going to come down to each resource requiring a specific "resource point" in which to be stored. Sure, copies can be made, but somewhere someplace has to be the original or "latest" copy. Some existing models could be applied to the system, like a name space lookup to determine the "true" origin of the record, and some sort of cashing system that automatically checks for updates... all very possible.

Darn it all, too bad I have other work to do.

Power of Silence said...

Hi,

Is it similar to web services ?

Thank you,

Power of Silence said...

Hi ,

Is it similar to web services ?

Thank you,