Yesterday at SpringOne was officially VMforce Day. We had an entire track dedicated to getting deep and dirty with VMforce. Ramnivas Laddad and I presented on Application Development focusing on how to manage inherent complexity, and lots of discussions on VMforce Use Cases. 

What is great about SpringOne is that this is a conference for developers—plain and simple. They don't care if you demo fails (the network went out in our session, and Ramnivas and I had to work some magic), if fact I think a lot of the developers prefer you to crack open terminal and start hacking. Hey, who am I to complain 🙂

One of the interesting aspects of talking about the Cloud at SpringOne is that you need to talk about what the developer experience will be: where do I look at logs, how do I move between environments, and what is the reason behind doing A or B. Just saying that "it's the cloud" isn't good enough. There has to be real compelling value. One such value statement is that, as a Spring Developer, I no longer need to worry about things like database scalability, web app redundancy etc. This is great news for the developer, as it means you can focus on what really matters to you—building cool apps. 

Another important use case we discussed is the notion of hybrid apps. Yes, there is a lot of value building an app on VMforce and connecting to the Force.com database (for the reasons listed above for a starter), but the platform, as we know, provides a LOT of other services: reporting, search, security to name a few. Hybrid apps are those apps that combine the best of both words. Imagine a public Spring app with a private 'native' Force.com app for back-office functions, and you start to see the additional value of VMforce. Why recreate reporting, sync your data between two systems, and so on. I think these hybrid apps will certainly be one of the prevalent patterns.

If you want to follow more VMforce updates in real-time, make sure you check out the #s2gx tag on Twitter.