Tag Archives: dreamforce

Don’t miss Ryan Dahl on Node.js

I’m just back from Dreamforce in San Francisco, where one of the sessions I enjoyed most was from Ryan Dahl in the Cloudstock pre-conference event.

He is the author of node.js, a binding for the V8 Javascript engine, not for running in the browser but for creating server apps. However, it is interesting even if you don’t want to use V8, because of the approach he takes to concurrency and I/O. I wrote up the session here, under the title Nginx the new Apache, node.js the new PHP?

What was Dahl doing at a Dreamforce conference? That was a question that puzzled me, until later in the week when it was announced that Salesforce.com is acquiring Heroku. Heroku has been experimenting with running node.js on its hosted infrastructure for Ruby applications, and may come up with a Ruby wrapper.

One day of hacks, REST and cloud: Salesforce.com Cloudstock

I’m in San Francisco for the annual Salesforce.com conference, where the pre-conference day is called Cloudstock and features a bunch of sessions on cloud development from vendors whom Salesforce.com considers more partners than competitors, and from Salesforce.com itself, along with a hackathon competition where you build an instant cloud app.

Why Cloudstock? The parallels with Woodstock’s peace love and music are obscure, but I think the idea is revolution of cloud vs revolution of free love, or something. Presumably nothing to do with mud, getting high or sneaking in without paying.

I’m guessing that the PR goal is to position Salesforce.com at the heart of cloud computing. Good PR, but there are many other ways to do cloud.

I’m in a session on Google App Engine and new Google platform technologies – an introductory talk by Christian Schalk. More on that in this separate post.