Have you heard about Cloud Computing? Who hasn’t? Everywhere I look, there are articles, seminars, webinars, books and conferences about cloud computing. What started years ago as timesharing, grid and utility computing, Web Services (Software as a Service) and application services has now morphed into Cloud based storage (Database as a Service) and Cloud application services (Platform as a Service).
With the release of RAD Studio XE we added support for Amazon S3 storage and also Microsoft Windows Azure storage. We have updated the cloud support in XE2. The new Cloud API includes a set of components and objects that make it simpler to deal with blobs and messages and tables, which are the Amazon and Microsoft Azure cloud storage system.
If you want to use our RAD Studio XE2 development environment to build applications for cloud based servers, you can install our Platform Assistant on a Windows Azure instance and Amazon EC2 Windows instance and use our IDE to deploy and debug you applications running in a Cloud.
Developers can choose the kind of software and IT architecture they want to use. Your choice may be to have parts of your application running inside your firewall and other parts running in the cloud (AKA Hybrid Cloud Computing). You can also decide to move everything into cloud architectures. To build a Cloud based application and leverage Cloud Storage services you can use Embarcadero’s DataSnap and our Cloud API. DataSnap allows you to put your data and code wherever you want and build applications (using Delphi, C++Builder, RadPHP, Embarcadero Prism, JavaScript, C#, Java and Objective-C) that can communicate with your server applications using TCP, HTTP, HTTPS and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).
As an example, I’m running an Amazon EC2 Windows micro-instance with a Delphi DataSnap server. You can use your browser to access my Cloud based DataSnap server at http://184.72.37.150:8089/. This application displays information and pictures from our FishFact dataset. The Delphi DataSnap server generates the browser client. In the browser client, HTML and JavaScript code uses call backs to the DataSnap server using REST calls to retrieve JSON packets containing fish information from a dataset. The JavaScript client parses the JSON and renders the HTML display.
We’re continuing to make it as easy as possible for your applications to access Cloud data storage for SQL and NoSQL data. You can also put Embarcadero InterBase in a cloud instance.
To help you get started with Cloud Computing, here are a few of the many resources that are available on our Embarcadero websites:
- Developing Applications for the Cloud using RAD Studio (on demand video): http://www.embarcadero.com/rad-in-action/cloud
- DataSnap XE2 – New Features and Improvements – Cloud APIs and Monitoring and Session management (CodeRage 6 session replay): http://cc.embarcadero.com/Item/28542
- RAD in Action – DataSnap white paper and videos by Bob Swart: http://www.embarcadero.com/rad-in-action/datasnap
- DataSnap Overview and Architecture – Embarcadero DocWiki: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/en/DataSnap_Overview_and_Architecture
- David I’s ComputerWorld three-part article about NoSQL databases : Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Our customers are asking for more cloud support, so we’re going to continue to support cloud architectures, cloud storage systems, and cloud based applications as, together, we move over the Cloud Computing horizon.
