A number of people were not able to make the VMforce demo so I threw together a short video showing my demo app and the code. I plan on doing a number of tutorials, demos and videos in the near future so stay tuned.

It may be easier to watch this at Youtube with a larger picture. Just double-click the video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHzasWSJS0w

If you are at Dreamforce today here are the sessions that I am speaking in. I’m really excited to be part of both of them as the topics (VMforce and the new Facebook toolkit) are really cool.

Leveraging Public Social Networks – West 2005 @ 12:15

We’ll be showing off the new Facebook toolkit and building a few applications.

VMforce: The Trusted Enterprise Platform as a Service - Force.com Theater @ 1:45

I’ll be demoing an app built using Spring STS, Spring Roo and Spring MVC connecting to the Force.com Database using JPA and running on the VMforce servers. I’ll show you the code, pick it apart and talk about best practices.

My blog has been rather quiet over the past couple of months and for good reason. I’m working on a project on the east coast and a project on the west coast, Wes and I are finishing up our Salesforce Handbook (we are currently having printing issues with the publisher) and I’ve been working with one of my favorite new Salesforce.com Developer Evangelists, Sandeep Bhanot, on my Facebook Toolkit app and preso for our Dreamforce 10 session “Leveraging Public Social Networks” (Wed 12/8 @ 12:15pm).

I finally got the approval yesterday to make the announcement that I’ll also be presenting a VMforce app in the session “VMforce: The Trusted Enterprise Platform as a Service” (Wed 12/8 @ 1:45pm). I’ve been working with Salesforce.com and VMware for the last couple of months trying to put together a cool demo of an existing on-premise Java app to show how easy it is to move apps to the cloud.

I use Spring STS and Spring Roo to build and test my apps locally before deploying them (with one click!) to the cloud.  The app uses the Spring 3 framework with standard POJOs, JSPs and Servlets just like any other Java app. The best part is that whether running locally or in the cloud, I have the same access to the Force.com Database, analytics and collaboration with Chatter. I also love the fact that I don’t have to worry about my server stack, maintaining app server configurations or software to install or patch!

Based upon what I’ve seen in the alpha program and the progress that’s being made, I think VMforce is going to be an incredible way for enterprise Java developers to run their applications in the cloud.

So a few months ago I promised to put together a Spring / Chatter / App Engine demo that could be possibly ported to VMforce. Since our Handbook is off to the printers, I’m back to doing fun stuff!

I’m looking for some ideas for a demo project that you typically wouldn’t do natively on the Force.com platform that you would like to eventually see on VMforce. Perhaps a customer facing Java app with a jQuery front end for HR, eCommerce or whatever.

Please send me your ideas!

I attended the Cloud Computing for Java Developers webinar yesterday, which was essentially an intro to VMforce and the Force.com platform for (non-Force.com) Java developers. Quinton Wall and Jesper Joergensen did a good job with the overview of the platform but I was really looking for some tidbits on VMforce. You can watch the recording of the webinar but here are some things that I found interesting…

1. For accessing the Force.com Database, developers will be able to use JPA, the new REST API and the Force.com WSC (SOAP-based).

2. According to Jesper, VMforce will not be included for all orgs. It will be an additional cost possibly as an additional license or subscription. However, it will be available to developers in DE orgs.

3. The Force.com IDE installs on top of SpringSouce Tool Suite (Eclipse)

4. Quinton provided a little more info on the REST API that will be piloted starting Winter 11.

5. VMforce apps are built, tested and debugged locally and then deployed to the Force.com tcServer instance as easily as any other web application would be deployed on-premise. To the IDE, Force.com just looks like another server.

6. Quinton did a quick demo where he created a simple POJO, deployed it to the server and it automatically created a Custom Object for it in Force.com (this auto-generation will probably be configurable in the future). VMforce is using the JPA implementation from DataNucleus (same as App Engine). Quinton’s provided some code examples where he queried Contact records using JPA and then displayed them in the browser:

The summary slide wrapped up the webinar.

Quinton Wall and Josh Long (SpringSource) conducted this early-morning webinar last Thursday in preparation of VMforce. Even though the webinar was essentially a high-level overview and demo of the Spring framework, there were some interesting VMforce nuggets. In addition to the screenshots below, Quinton did release that Salesforce will be using JPA to connect to the Salesforce database.

You can watch the recording of the webinar in case you missed it. If you are not familiar with Spring, it is a really good overview of the their frameworks, APIs and tools.

There is another webinar scheduled for September 9th, Cloud Computing for Java Developers, that will cover more technical details on VMforce. Don’t miss it!

Click the image below for a larger view.

Following up on yesterday’s post, Get Ready for VMForce – Here’s How!, I was thinking about putting together a series of tutorials on building a Chatter app on App Engine using Spring MVC with JDO. This will take considerable effort and I’m just wondering if it would be valuable to the Salesforce.com community.

View This Poll

UPDATE: I spoke with Umit Yalcinalp at Salesforce.com and they are planning some webinars on this topic the end of August. I don’t want to steal their thunder so I’ll possibly look at doing this mid-September sometime.

VMForce is coming (sometime in the near future) so what can you do to get started now? If I was a betting man (with inside info), here is what I’d do to get ready.

Start Building on Google App Engine
My guess is that VMForce will look a little like Google App Engine. You’ll probably have access to a wide range of Java libaries but not all of them. Based upon Salesforce.com’s current model you can expect that there will be some platform governors and limits in place. This should provide you with some experience and a working knowledge of some issues you may run into. If you want to get up and running quickly you can always buy my book Beginning Java Google App Engine (yes… blatant plug).

Start Learning Spring
I would probably start with Spring MVC or Spring Web Flow 2 initially. The good thing is that most of Spring also runs on App Engine so you should be able to move any apps you write on App Engine to VMForce. Here’s a great article to get you started with Spring MVC.

I would also download the SpringSource Tool Suite which is a Eclipse plugin for Spring development. It should fit in nicely with the Force.com IDE.

You might also want to dowload Spring’s tc Server Developer Edition. If you are using App Engine you can develop locally but you might also want to check out tc Server. The key component of tc Server Developer Edition is the Spring Insight console, a dashboard view of real-time Spring application performance metrics. Without changing code, developers can use Spring Insight to detect, analyze and diagnose application performance issues right from the desktops. This was demoed at Google IO and it was very slick! There’s a really cool video if you want to see how it works.

Dig into Persistence Layers
You’ll definitely want to start working with a persistance layer like JDO, JPA or Hibernate. Based upon some recent comments from Salesforce.com, I would look at JPA first.

Develop with the Force.com Web Service Connector (WSC)
Most developers are familiar with the WS-APIs but you should really start looking at the Force.com Web Service Connector. I’m writing an article for developer.force.com on how to use the WSC so keep an eye out for that shortly.

Try Spring Roo
If you have some extra time you might want to look into Spring Roo. Roo is a lightweight developer tool that allows you to build apps in minutes. They demoed Roo and Google Web Toolkit together at Google IO with impressive results.

Yesterday at Appirio we had a private demo of the WaveMaker platform from the guys at WaveMaker. I’ll try to recap most of the things that I heard as it pertains to Salesforce.com and vmforce but for more details you’ll want to check out their website.

The WaveMaker platform allows you to build applications that are portable across cloud environments. WaveMaker’s rapid application development platform consists of two products:

• WaveMaker Studio: a visual, drag & drop development tool that runs in a browser and can be installed on a desktop or accessed via the cloud.
• WaveMaker Server: a Java framework that provides security and data management, runs in any Java server and deploys on-site or in the cloud

The WaveMaker Studio is a pretty slick drag-n-drop interface with live previews of data for bound widgets. You can consume Web Services, database schemas and Java services to automatically generate boilerplate code for you. On the frontend it generates Dojo widgets and Spring and Hibernate components for the backend. It essentially spits out a standard Spring application that will run in any standard J2EE environment.

Development features include:

• Drag & drop application assembly
• One-click database import
• One-click CRUD data forms
• One-click related data forms
• Live data preview within studio
• Single sign-on security
• Role-based access controls
• Rich entry field validation
• Built-in data grid pagination
• Auto-complete search boxes

So how does this related to Salesforce.com? They are working for a release in July that supports the Force.com platform and will run on VMforce. They can consume the Enterprise WSDL and generate a standard front and back end components that you can import into Eclipse and start customizing. Their goal is to treat Salesforce just like any other database. However they are trying to build in some platform logic such as governor and limits based up the running edition. These java apps can then be deployed to EC2 and VMforce.

If you are interested, there is a free, community edition you can get started with right away. I’m not sure of the pricing for their enterprise or cloud editions so you’ll want to check with them if they have a seat and/or runtime license before you invest too much time.

Some other interesting points from yesterday’s meeting:

• Web Fast: with WaveMaker’s visual tools, any developer can start building enterprise Java applications with minimal training.
• CIO Safe: WaveMaker creates standard Java applications, boosting developer productivity and quality without compromising flexibility.
• Cloud Ready: WaveMaker enables one-click deployment of rich internet applications to on-site or cloud hosting.
• Cuts Java learning curve 92%: College grads can build Java web apps in 2 months versus 2 years
• Reduces code 98%: Migrated .NET app with 26K lines of code to WaveMaker with 335 lines.
• Slashes maintenance 75%: Self-service for call center app eliminates 75% of maintenance costs