Today Salesforce.com and VMware announced VMForce, a new extension of the force.com platform from SpringSource (a division of VMware), upon which enterprises can build and run Java applications.
This is exciting news in the world of Saleforce.com, as its proprietary programming language (Apex) and markup (VisualForce) technologies are considered drawbacks because of ramp-up time and vendor lock-in concerns. With this development Salesforce.com appears to be eliminating a major talking points to their detractors.
What remains to be seen is how portable Java applications and the Spring libraries upon which they are build will be. A fundamental axiom of Cloud Computing (and the primary means by which it achieves its cost-effectiveness) is multi-tennancy (i.e. the ability to run many enterprise's operations on one shared platform).
Clearly VMForce must prevent rogue enterprise applications from bringing down the platform by hogging resources through either malicious or poorly structured database operations. This alone will require significant re-factoring of existing on-premise Enterprise Java applications.
I for one will be paying close attention to details of VMForce as they are released.
