Chasing the Holy Grail of Software

Jason Kolb wrote a great piece today entitled “The Holy Grail of Software”, and while the first part of the article walks you through the mindset and life-cycle of what he believes to be the typical developer, the part I want to point out is:

“I don’t think one application should run everything, but I do think that they can all work together. I think that in the mess that is the semantic Web there are bits and pieces that can actually work together to be a framework that a standardized application infrastructure can sit on top of. Although I don’t think that it’s possible to write one application and never have to write anything ever again, I DO think it’s possible to write the core functionality of certain pieces of software so that you never have to write CERTAIN PARTS again”

He then goes on to point out that the appexchange is a good example of this, but that it comes along with some baggage, namely having to have your data live inside Salesforce.com’s data centers and not being able to get really deep into the code for ultimate customization. I think SFDC has proven to me that they can be Apex would alleviate those concerns, but I really think Jason is on to something much bigger than even what Salesforce can deliver to the marketplace. Jason continues:

“So here it is, my new Holy Grail of Software: A distributed application infrastructure that sits on top of the Internet as its back-end database. If you read between the lines quite a few of my posts recently have been me thinking out loud about it. And it’s really been quite a fun exercise to try to figure out how it should work, I think it’s very doable and actually not very far down the road.”

There is a tremendous movement going on to bring software applications to the web, and I agree that it seems very doable and is just a matter of time. The question for Salesforce.com is what role will they play and will the proprietary Apex language win out over open source, or how will a player like Google influence the architecture for these future applications.

Through the development and expansion of API’s and WebServices the likelyhood of this connected business web is really close to becoming a reality and I think we’re at a very cool turning point for software and services coming online.