Cloud computing continues to heat up since I blogged about my experiences with Heroku (on-demand Ruby on Rails development using the Amazon Web Services).  If you work in the IT industry, the cloud ware concept may be creeping in to your lexicon, your discussions, your Gartner reports and your Friday afternoon, 4:30pm daydreams [ed: I admit *no* guilt].  Here are some highlights related to web apps, in non-chronological order.

Heroku secured a $3 million round of funding.  To give you a perspective on scale, that amounts to $1 million per founding employee.  Among other things, the blog post noted that some funding will be devoted to supporting the impressive numbers of applications already being built on the platform.  They have definitely found some pain points or at least a target market eager to build web apps on the cloud.  This kind of service offering might present some future opportunities for custom internal app development, light-weight service integration or even customer portals which need to combine internal, product and vendor-provided APIs.  At the very least, it drastically lowers the financial risk of prototyping and building proofs of concept to sell to the business by taking the platform cost almost to $0.

Google App Engine launched some time after Heroku offering the ability to build web applications on Google’s famed cloud infrastructure.  Google App Engine is more restrictive and more targeted in its current intended usage than Heroku—basically, purely non-relational database and access to external data sources using only HTTPS.  On the flip side, the non-relational database and the ability to use Google Accounts for user access are big bonuses for some types of projects.  The big news last week was that Google unleashed invites beyond the original limit of 10,000 developers (which included yours truly, serial early adopter) and announced pricing.

If you’re interested in seeing under the covers of Google App Engine and you’re interested in seeing an example use then check out this code.  I spent my lunch break writing a simple (very, very simple) form on App Engine which lets you send files across the Trading Grid to a receiver EDI address.  It’s a proof of concept using a test mailbox, so the point is really just to demonstrate the kinds of mash-ups that could be achieved in the cloud with your internal APIs and service provider’s (like GXS) APIs.  If you want to know more about our HTTPS or SOAP capabilities provided by the Shared Message Gateway on Trading Grid Ultra, drop a comment.

So, that’s about all I had for this edition.  Clearly, the cloud is seeing interest, activity and investment.  If you aren’t doing anything with or thinking about the cloud yet, you probably will be within the next few years.  There are some big developments ahead, I’m sure.  Heroku supports Ruby and Google supports Python.  Where are the statically-typed languages on the JVM (Rhino on Rails?) or on .NET?  Where is Microsoft with the .NET cloud?  Where is Yahoo! (and will the first question eventually answer the second one too ;-)?

To quote Under the Influence of Giants, “meet me in the clouds.”