On demand development

[Harmpie]

With Salesforce.com introducing the Force.com platform, allowing on demand development of UI and business logic, I am wondering if Sugar will clone this feature as well, like it did with most other SF features. Anything similar on the sugar roadmap?

[christianknoll]

Provocative I would phrase it the way that the onDemand model SF stands for is doomed anyway and will die sooner or later. I hope the Sugar Community is smart enough to take this to the next level rather then cloning an outdated concept.

;-) ...

christian.

With Salesforce.com introducing the Force.com platform, allowing on demand development of UI and business logic, I am wondering if Sugar will clone this feature as well, like it did with most other SF features. Anything similar on the sugar roadmap?

[Harmpie]

That's an interesting statement. Why would you qualify the on-demand model as dying? If I look at the 'installed base' (and it's growth), I see a different trend. What's outdated in the model in your opinion?

[christianknoll]

I did not say that the onDemand Model is dying in general. I only did say that the on Demand Model SF stands for is soon to be outdated.

Reasons for that:
- limited flexibility in a pure mutlitenant environment. With virtualization and other mechanisms in place the need for multitnenancy is loosing ground
- bound to one deployment model: you don't have freedom to change the deployment if you wish due to the architecture
- ... and numerous others ...

No onDemand is not dead but the monolytic pure onDemand based model is a thing of the past. it will be interesting how Sugar themselves respond to this. Seeing the recent announcemnts I think that sugar is trying to follow SF to much ... getting in a copy mode rather then in the mode of the guys stirring up the pond ...

christian.

That's an interesting statement. Why would you qualify the on-demand model as dying? If I look at the 'installed base' (and it's growth), I see a different trend. What's outdated in the model in your opinion?

[Harmpie]

- I agree that multi-tenancy imposes limits, but doesn't virtualization involve multi-tenancy as well? Would be rather costly if it doesn't
- One deployment model sounds more as an advantage, rather then a disadvantage

So still, don't see many reasons for thinking the SF model is dying. Only big downside I see, looking at the on-demand development on the Force.com platform, is the implicit vendor lock-in. So any on-demand model that excludes that would be the winner imho.

[matthew]

Harmpie-

We're certainly looking to provide the best OnDemand Experience. Our evolution in this is to provide the Open Cloud. Are you familiar with it? I posted on our blog about it here

http://developers.sugarcrm.com/wordp...-does-it-mean/

We'd certainly appreciate your feedback!

[Harmpie]

Good post. I made a comment as well. There's 1 thing I would like to add to my comment here:

I think that the on-demand development model that Force.com offers (I am a Force.com developer myself), has it's weaknesses, but also a strength, which you might also easily discard as a weakness. The fact that the environment is governed and therefore limited, will have a programmer occasionally curse te very existance of the platform. I hower learnt, that the limitations (all though imposed to facilitate multi-tenancy), have a programmer think 10 times before coding something. The risk of creating rubbish code is very small , due to this, making the limitations a pro, more than a con in my opinion. Another big PRO I think, is the 99.9% backward compatibility it offers, which is dicutable at best with the freedom an open cloud would offer. In other words: full freedom is not necessarily good.

Ofcourse, if used well, this type of freedom can be an enormous strength as well, I certainly will not debate that

[SugarDev.net]

Could you elaborate on the BC differences?

[christianknoll]

Matthew,

the article is suprisingly marketing oriented for a Developer ... ;-) .. unfortunately I do not get it why the cloud is open? If I take SugarExpress as CE Version hosted by SugarCRM what is Open there? The Soruce Code of the product - OK but what does htis mean if it running on your premises only and I can have no influence on the Source Code. I could not even check if the Courecode is the same ...

I think an open cloud story is interesting but what you are describing is a mix of term and has not much to do with an openness. this is the same vendor lockin that SF has but only on a different product.

An Open cloud would be fun if e.g. Applkications or modules can run on different servers virtually boud together by the virtual and open installation a user chooses. So e.g. a module on your site, another module from one of our servers etc. Imagine all these modules working a s standalone services encapulated seamlessly together. Datastorage is a big topic that would need to be resolved however but this is a different story.

christian.

Harmpie-

We're certainly looking to provide the best OnDemand Experience. Our evolution in this is to provide the Open Cloud. Are you familiar with it? I posted on our blog about it here

http://developers.sugarcrm.com/wordp...-does-it-mean/

We'd certainly appreciate your feedback!

[matthew]

@christianknoll

Well I certainly didn't mean to come off as an employee of Marketing One of my goals was to remove the marketing fluff and make the message clear to developers. The message is that freedom is important. We are now entering an era of "cloud" computing where there is a new way to hide the source from the developer. What is "Open" is the portability of the application. If you take Sugar Express and run it on our hosted platform and you HATE it, you have the freedom to take your CRM to another hosting vendor. That's open and you can't do that with SFDC, so I politely disagree with your assertion this is the same product as SFDC.

I do like your idea of binding different "clouds" together. Distributed file & datastores are completely doable. I think this could be easily done with something like AWS EC2 and the storage blocks.

@Harmpie
Thanks for your kind words. I initially worked in Support when I first joined SugarCRM (I was one of that teams' founding members) and I can tell you from first hand experience that supporting all of the worlds platforms is a nightmare. I've always been jealous of SFDC from that perspective. However, as my mother would say, nothing worth doing is easy.