In this interview we speak with cloud computing expert Janakiram MSV. Janakiram talks of what the cloud has to offer and how the various software platforms are placed as regards cloud adoption. He shares his thoughts on the top cloud service providers & the steps involved in migrating to the cloud. Finally he delves on the risks & drawbacks of cloud computing that we need to watch out for.

Python scripting language use has increased by 45% since Spring 2008 according the an Evans Data North American Development Survey. Only 13% of developers used Python before Google announced its App Engine platform in Spring 2008, which at the time only supported Python, but that number has increased to 20.3% today. Other scripting language use remained relatively constant, with only small gains or losses in popularity among languages such as Ruby, PHP, Perl and Actionscript.

Google has released a new version of the Google App Engine Java SDK, version 1.2.2. This is largely a bugfix release, but there are some interesting new features:

Google I/O 2009 is being held on May 27 and 28 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. One of the key themes of this year’s event is the unprecedented acceleration of the open web platform: Nearly half a billion people now use browsers that are rooted in open source technology, which have quintupled their processing power in less than a year. Now, the new functionality in HTML 5 — from graphics and location to local storage and background processing — is enabling developers to build uniquely powerful web applications.

Dustin Amrhein in his article “Should Developers Care About Cloud Computing?” on SysCon talks of why cloud computing matters to software developers and the changes that developers need to make so as to best utilize cloud computing.

Anirudh Dewani looks at What is the Google Web Toolkit (GWT)?, the GWT architecture, JRE emulation & IDE support. He also looks at GWT Modules, Optimized JavaScript, Direct Http/JSON – RPC/ Server Side Support. He develops a GWT application highlighting GWT capabilities, including its support for unit testing and internationalization.