14-07-2011, 02:38 PM
For some time now, both small and large companies have been building robust applications for personal computers that continue to be ever more powerful and available at increasingly lower costs. While these applications are being used by millions of users each day, new forces are having a profound effect on the way software developers build applications today and the platform in which they develop and deploy their application.The increased presence of Internet technologies is enabling global sharing of information—not only from small and large businesses, but individuals as well. The Internet has sparked a new creativity in many, resulting in many new businesses popping up overnight, running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Competition and the increased pace of change are putting ever-increasing demands for an application platform that enables application developers to build and rapidly deploy highly adaptive applications in order to gain strategic advantage.It is possible to think of these new Internet applications needing to handle literally millions of users—a scale difficult to imagine a just a few short years ago. As a result, applications need to deal with user volumes of this scale, reliable to operate 24 hours a day and flexible to meet changing business needs. The application platform that underlies these types of applications must also provide a coherent application model along with a set of infrastructure and prebuilt services for enabling development and management of these new applications.