There is no other word for it, but Dreamforce this year is HUGE. This is the first time I have had a chance to sit down and blog. After this mornings keynote with the announcement of the acquisition of Heroku, Platform2, and yesterday's news on Database.com, it is safe to say the focus is squarely on the Force.com platform. You choose your language, your device, and your platform. We will take care of the rest. If you have checked out the Developing with Database.com article I wrote for the Database.com site.
Yesterday I presented a number of sessions on VMforce to a packed house. At the start of the session I polled the audience for a show of hands to see who were Force.com developers, and who were Java developers. I was happy to see that about 80% of people were Java developers interested in moving to the cloud! I suspect the next time I speak, the mix of Ruby developers will be the same. And I couldn't be happier. For the developer.force.com team, this gives us so many more opportunities to get out there and talk about the cloud—After all, that's what it is all about.
I also spent some time checking out some of the developer sessions and just finished attended the Authentication and REST API session presented by Alex Toussaint and Chuck Mortimore. Here is a little snap to give you a sense of how popular the session was.
After being wowed by the REST session I decided to wander the expo floor a bit see what was going on with the partners and Salesforce exhibits. Like the rest of the show, everything was big!
I'm sitting here now, relaxing in a beanbag giving my feet a rest before diving back in. I can't help and reflect on where next year will take us. At the beginning of 2010, the evangelist team spoke almost exclusively to 'native' Force.com developers—those who developed purely with Visualforce and Apex. Who would have dreamed by the end of the year we would have kicked off Dreamforce with an amazing event like Cloudstock, and now have something like 8-9 million developers in the Force.com community which now also includes Java developers, and Ruby developers.
Here's to 2011.
