Tier Splitting Volta: Who. What. How. Why - Part 2

Charles — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:12:47 GMT

Erik Meijer and a small team of very sharp developers (including Brian Beckman) have cooked up an intriguing toolset for building multi-tier distributed applications: Volta.

When the Volta CTP release announcement hit the wire last week, the press declared Volta as a Java killer, etc. In reality, Volta is primarily, and most importantly, a tier splitting system where the details of the tiers aren't of primary importance.

So, the most obvious case is Silverlight 2.0 as the client tier and a web server as the server tier... This is a great scenario since Volta can split IL to IL without having to resort to IL translation to, say, JavaScript (which has gotten too much attention). Further, execution contexts such as XNA, WinForms, DHTML, SVG, VML, even SQL are realistic client targets (tiers) for Volta. Then there's the notion of a local "distributed" system (think of applications running on a single client as the tiers) where Volta also makes sense as a means of easily composing the system.

Too much has been made of the IL to Javascript translation capabilities, so much so that people are apparently not seeing the forest for the trees. Well, have no fear. Over the coming days you are going to learn more about Volta than you can imagine and the people who'll you learn from also happen to be the people who thought up and implemented Volta.

The most important thing here, technically, is that Volta provides an intuitive and elegant toolset for composing concurrent distributed muti-tiered applications.

Think of Volta as a technology that facilitates communication between distributed execution contexts (a tier is just an execution context in this model). Using Volta in an client-web server scenario is only one approach. Volta could be used in many more interesting contexts (XNA, WinForms, WPF, even Singularity – use your imagination…).

This is part 2 where we continue to dig deeply into Volta. Lot's of whiteboarding and even a code sample using VS.

See part 1 Volta.

When the Volta CTP release announcement hit the wire last week, the press declared Volta as a Java killer, etc. In reality, Volta is primarily, and most importantly, a tier splitting system where the details of the tiers aren't of primary importance.

So, the most obvious case is Silverlight 2.0 as the client tier and a web server as the server tier... This is a great scenario since Volta can split IL to IL without having to resort to IL translation to, say, JavaScript (which has gotten too much attention). Further, execution contexts such as XNA, WinForms, DHTML, SVG, VML, even SQL are realistic client targets (tiers) for Volta. Then there's the notion of a local "distributed" system (think of applications running on a single client as the tiers) where Volta also makes sense as a means of easily composing the system.

Too much has been made of the IL to Javascript translation capabilities, so much so that people are apparently not seeing the forest for the trees. Well, have no fear. Over the coming days you are going to learn more about Volta than you can imagine and the people who'll you learn from also happen to be the people who thought up and implemented Volta.

The most important thing here, technically, is that Volta provides an intuitive and elegant toolset for composing concurrent distributed muti-tiered applications.

Think of Volta as a technology that facilitates communication between distributed execution contexts (a tier is just an execution context in this model). Using Volta in an client-web server scenario is only one approach. Volta could be used in many more interesting contexts (XNA, WinForms, WPF, even Singularity – use your imagination…).

In this episode (or part 1, if you will) we meet the team and learn the basics. Since it's a room full of devs there is whiteboarding and lots of techincal talk, just the way we like it here on C9.

You will be seeing much more of this great team over the coming days and Volta will make more sense with each epsiode, culminating in an Expert to Expert Going Deep where we a great deal of how Volta's tier splitting capabilities are implemented and get a clear picture of what a tier actually can be.

It's all about tier splitting and a tier is simply an execution context. Volta is much more than a web technology...

Tune in. Learn.

Erik Meijer: Volta - Wrapping the Cloud with .NET - Part 2

Charles — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 14:09:01 GMT

You've probably not heard of Volta, but you know Erik Meijer by now. We love talking to him and learning about his latest brilliant ideas. Volta is no exception to Erik and team's typical innovation. What is Volta, you ask?

Volta is an evolving research project focused on exploring ways to innovate data-intensive programming models. Volta is currently exploring a lean-programming inspired toolkit for building web-based and mobile applications by stretching the .NET programming model to cover the Cloud.

Volta is exploring innovation that empowers programmers to delay decisions about tier-splitting to the last possible responsible moment by using either code refactoring or declarative annotations.

Volta is also innovating ideas for frictionless deployment of pure .NET-based web-based applications by using “the materials already available in the room” in the form of zero/near-zero weight client footprints.

Well now, that all sounds dandy doesn't it? But, what is Volta, exactly? Who better to explain it to us than C9 regular Erik Meijer, programming language architect and computer scientist. It's always great to chat with Erik. Enjoy. This is part 2 of a 2 part series. Here, Erik continues his description of Volta, but with demos and code! See part one

Entries tagged with volta - Channel 9

Tier Splitting Volta: Who. What. How. Why - Part 2

Erik Meijer: Volta - Wrapping the Cloud with .NET - Part 2