More Velocity

I had quite an interesting conversation the other day with Anil Nori, who is the "Distinguished Engineer" in charge of the Microsoft Velocity effort.

Anil comes to Microsoft from Oracle, so he is not driven by blind devotion to the Church of Microsoft. Anil is on a mission, wants to do what's right, and has a very similar vision that I do ... Velocity as the center of the "data universe".

One of the things that I was concerned about was interoperability in Velocity. It was good to know that this is a topic that Anil has been thinking about. In most investment banks, it's usually the native Java object caches that are installed, and each of the object caches have to find some way to interop with .NET clients. With Velocity, it is the other way around. Anil knows that, in order to be successful in our world, he has to provide interop with Java.

Quite truthfully, I have to say that Velocity has most .NET developers jumping up and down. I was on a call with the ".NET leadership" of my company today, and when I started talking about Velocity, everyone wanted to know how they could start playing with it. I have not seen this reaction caused by any Microsoft product in quite a while. WPF, WCF, and LINQ were greeted by "ho-hums" within my company. But Velocity was a different story.

This shows you how enterprise .NET architects and developers yearn to get the same tools that our Java brethren have had access to for a while. Yes, I know that Tangasol and Gigaspaces and Gemfire have .NET caches now. But, there is a certain glimmer in people's eyes when they hear that one of these enterprise technologies is coming from Microsoft. It's like welcoming home a lost-long relative.

Can we use Velocity to cache an entire day's worth of orders, and easily let a client retrieve any order by ID or a list of orders in a certain time range or a list of orders that use a certain algo?

Welcome home, Microsoft.... now, don't disappoint me!

©2008 Marc Adler - All Rights Reserved.
All opinions here are personal, and have no relation to my employer.