A Radical Transformation - Running Chrome Inside of Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer, particularly versions 6 and before, are the bane of any web developer's existence. The Internet Explorer versions Microsoft produced during the competion-free era between when Netscape died and Firefox came on the scene are masterpieces of monopolistic neglect. IE 5 and IE6 are slow, proprietary and just plain awful to work with.

Worst of all, Microsoft guaranteed themselves longtime domination of the corporate browser market through this cynical behavior because all the web apps built for IE 5 and 6 are so full of hacks that they won't run on "modern" browsers!

Nothing strikes fear into the heart of our professional services team quite like the words: "yeah, we're thinking about rolling out IE 7 sometime in the next 18 months."

But now there is a way out of the nightmare that is IE. Alex Russell at Google (of Dojo Toolkit fame) has figured out a way to run Chrome as a plug-in inside of IE - even the old versions. This means that web developers can build applications the way nature intended and IE is none the wiser.

For cloud computing in general and Platform as a Service in particular, this is great news. With Platform as a Service (PaaS), you develop and deploy apps from within your browser, so the power of the browser directly governs the power of the your development platform.

For WaveMaker and other PaaS vendors, this extends the reach of our cloud computing solutions to the back hinterlands of corporate America where technological change comes most slowly and where consequently frustration with IT is highest.

Making Cloud Computing Ridiculously Easy

With all the hullabaloo about cloud computing, it is easy to get caught up in the trend of the day and miss the big picture. The big picture is that cloud computing disrupts the data center world by slashing the capital and skills required to deploy a web application.

If that is the big prize, then most of what passes for news in cloud computing is more along the lines of "me speak cloud too."

Today, cloud development and deployment is still the exclusive domain of highly paid web experts and just as highly paid hosting providers and systems administrators. As much as cloud providers like Amazon and Rackspace have done to simplify web hosting and eliminate people from the equation, it still takes far too much expertise and effort to get applications built and deployed in the cloud.

The goal of cloud computing is to make web development and deployment something that any bum can do and charge in on their credit card with nary a care in the world.

With all due humility, I think RightScale and WaveMaker have taken a big step towards that goal this week, introducing an easy-to-use cloud development platform with one-click deployment to Amazon EC2 via RightScale.

It is now monkeys-on-keyboards easy to create a web application and deploy it in a secure, scalable cloud environment using WaveMaker/RightScale and Amazon.

So who cares about this stuff anyway? How 'bout IBM and Amazon!

On Thursday, October 1, IBM and Amazon are hosting a half-day webinar entitled Cloud computing for developers: Hosted by IBM and Amazon Web Services . At that webinar, WaveMaker and RightScale will provide an online demonstration of building a web application with WaveMaker and deploying it to a WebSphere AMI using RightScale. One small click for man, one giant cloud for mankind!