Microsoft is at work on a project to enable everyday developers to build Web applications, just as easily as folks have built Visual Basic applications over the years. The project to enable this is called Volta and it is headed up by Erik Meijer, a Microsoft architect in the company"s SQL Server group. Meijer gave a demonstration of Volta at OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, Systems and Applications) here on Oct. 23 and later discussed the technology with me.
"If you look at when VB came on the market, it was really, really hard to do Windows programming," Meijer said. "You had to be a C++ programmer, and then VB came around and then suddenly people could write Windows programs. Now it"s the era of the Web, but in some senses we"re back in the early days of Windows programming." Meijer entitled his talk "Democratizing the Cloud," indicating that Volta makes it easier for anyone to build apps that can be deployed on the Internet or in the cloud.