Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4. Both Force.com and Salesforce.com are accompanied by organized
user communities named Developer Force and Salesforce.com
Community, which provide both user networking and professional
consulting services offered by Salesforce.com and their partners.
The Force.com platform includes development tools and a programming
environment suitable, for example, to develop the logic of an application in
Apex, a programming language with a Java-like syntax. Other features are
the support of user interface development with Visualforce, the integration
of software testing procedures, or the connection of external Web Services
through a dedicated API.
For the development of custom Web applications, a programming model
with a highly data-centric approach is used: The development of an applica-
tion usually starts with the creation of an object model that will later hold
the application data. For the data elements, constraints can be defined that
improve the data quality. Just like workflows and acceptance processes, these
two initial steps can be defined directly from within the development envi-
ronment, using the available data. Use of the Apex programming language
is only required if a more complex application logic must be implemented.
The developer tools are not only helpful in the essential steps mentioned
earlier required to meet functional and nonfunctional requirements but also
in the context of the organizational workflows that are necessary to pack
the developed application and deploy it as an offering to potential custom-
ers. Developers who wish to learn how to write programs on Force.com can
obtain comprehensive material in the form of tutorials, manuals, reference
documents, and code samples on the web-based community portals.
16.4 Open Source Cloud Solutions
In addition to commercial cloud services, many open-source cloud com-
puting solutions can be flexibly tailored to build private cloud services for
the specific demands of a user. This chapter introduces four major open-
source cloud computing solutions: Nimbus, OpenNebula, Eucalyptus, and
CloudStack.
16.4.1 Nimbus
Started in 2003 and developed by the Argonne National Laboratory at the
University of Chicago, Nimbus focuses on the computing demands of scien-
tific users. Nimbus has two variations: Nimbus Infrastructure and Nimbus
Platform. Nimbus Infrastructure provides solutions for IaaS and has been
designed to support the needs of data-intensive scientific research projects.
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