Microsoft Live Labs Volta
If you haven't heard of Microsoft Live Labs Volta, you might want to check it out. While it doesn't seem quite ready for prime time - and who knows, it may become something else, or part of something else in the future - it does work and works quite well. Volta is a framwork for tier-splitting applicaitons (web applicaitons, WPF, WinForms, etc). The applicaiton developer does not need to be concerned about what the final deployment target(s) will be when writing the applicaiton, and at deployment time can decorate the code with attributes used to denote where parts of the applicaiton will live. In several of the web application examples, this results in the deployable web application being an HTML page, with web services residing on the server. Volta writes the Javascript to take care of the communication between the two. From the Volta web site:
The Volta technology preview is a developer toolset that enables you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns. First, design and build your application as a .NET client application, then assign the portions of the application to run on the server and the client tiers late in the development process. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together
It will be interesting to see how this idea evolves with cloud computing. Find out more:
