Hello World

Welcome to my blog. There are plenty of software blogs around (according to one colleague, the worlds first write-only medium), so why add yet another one? Well, I have a specific target audience. The people within my own company... although, as I am talking about things that may be of interest to the wider community, I decided to post on the web.

I work as a developer for a relatively small software company who is starting to get to grips with the ideas of Web applications, Software as a Service and the currently trendy term "Cloud Computing".

This company is a Microsoft partner, selling primarily a client-server style Windows forms-based application. So even some of our most experienced developers don't really have much experience dealing with the more esoteric subjects involved in Web development. The environment, culture, architectural style, and languages used on the web are quite different from the (traditionally) more centrally planned monoculture of enterprise software.

Later this year our company will begin exploring what we're referring to internally as "vNext" which is (possibly) the next major version of our core product (possibly a new product or collection of products). The redpills amongst us know (although not all are necessarily all that comfortable with the fact) that this really needs to be a scalable web application (or at the very least an application that has web architecture at its' core). Those people not yet entirely convinced, have increasingly flimsy reasons for keeping our core product as necessarily a client/server style application.

My aim is that if our company is moving in this direction (as I believe it has to), as a team we all need to have a better understanding of the nature of the web and the services that run on it, not only from a technical perspective, but from business, economic and environmental ones too if our company is to thrive in the future.

Over the coming weeks/months, I will be writing about all kinds of fascinating topics :-) but with the main aim of clarifying some of the concepts, patterns, practices, languages, dialects, rituals and sacrifices involved in producing large scale web applications.

My overall plan is to start with a general background to the Web, then to look at the principles, general constraints and architecture of distributed applications. I can then start to look at specific design patterns and practices that can be adopted to create web scale services and applications.

I've not written a blog before so any feedback would be greatly appreciated. (Particularly if you fundamentally disagree with anything I'm saying!)

Thanks for reading,

Chris.