Following my recent series of blogs on continuous integration on the Force.com platform I thought it worthwhile following up with a short slide presentation and actual demo of CI working in the wild. So please view the slide presentation here:

and the demo here:

Here I am at Dreamforce 2010 in San Francisco amid considerable excitement at the recent announcement concerning database.com. I anticipate we’ll see a huge uptake of database.com as new and existing applications leverage it. So what exactly is it and why is it so special?

Database.com is a relational database in the cloud. It comes with various development toolkits and includes a “social data model” that makes it very easy to build profiles and newsfeeds into your applications. It comes with APIs witten in pretty much all the current popular development languages. It’s massively scalable, secure, always available and alleviates the administration overhead of on-premise infrastructure. Cloud applications running on any platform can leverage database.com for their storage requirements.

Especially interesting is the use of the Java Persistence API (JPA). JPA is very familiar to millions of Java developers the world over. Using the new SpringSource toolkit for Eclipse, applications can be written and tested in the standard fashion and, with a simple click of a button, deployed to database.com or VMForce.com. The deployment tools take care of creating the underlying objects. There are a number of very cool features that come with these toolkits that I won’t delve into here, but watch this space for more articles.

The cloud is here to stay and vendors are taking pains to ensure seamless interoperability between their platforms. Database.com could just be that missing ingredient that seals the decision for organisations the world over to take the plunge.

Software Advice, an online resource for software buyers, provides an interesting exclusive pre-briefing from Salesforce’s Eric Stahl, Senior Director of Product Marketing. View it here.

Salesforce took a bold step toward a more fully integrated cloud platform by announcing VMForce, an exciting collaboration with VMware.

Both VMware and Salesforce are leaders in cloud computing. VMware is known for virtualization, while Salesforce for software-as-a-service via the Force.com platform.

VMforce is significant because it opens the Force.com platform to 6+ million java developers worldwide, allowing any company with Java developers to easily develop Java apps locally and deploy them to the cloud. Because all Java apps on VMforce are elastic, you don’t have to worry about scaling up app servers, databases, or infrastructure. You also inherit rich Force.com functionality like reporting and dashboards, full text search, calendaring, contact management and workflow.

We anticipate this will accelerate adoption of the cloud. Everyone at Myriad Minds is excited to see what innovative Java applications will soon be hosted on the Force.com platform.