Open Source+ SOA+ Cloud Computing = ?
Since cloud computing is becoming a hot topic in IT realm this year, the fundamental benefit of cloud computing is that it can reduce the maintenance cost of a service program, especially when the service need to be scalable for extending businesses. Service developers don’t have to care about the underlying platform and hardware configurations. They will focus on the Biz logics. But how about creating a platform based on cloud computing, so the developers can leverage this easy-to-use platform to develop, test, and deploy biz services. Google apps is a bit similar with this idea, yet it lacks of Biz service data storage (They may provide data storage service later), service version management, and for most, lacks of the ability for mass collaborations like Open source software development.
Imagine there is a web based development platform, similar with wikipedia, register users can create services leveraging a rich set of underlying Biz APIs (data storage, logging, etc), then they can deploy the service as beta version, other developers can improve the service continuously, when the service passed enough tests, specific version of the service can go stable and available to the globe. Each service may have several different versions, some are for testing, while others are for real Biz cases.
Is that just an illusion or it may be applicable?