Salesforce could be regarded as the cloud computing leader but history tells us that many-a-giant has fallen before. Apple has; Microsoft has; IBM has. I think Salesforce is still on the up ‘n up, but there are contenders out there and some of them are noteworthy; probably the most obvious of these is Google. Over the past few months I’ve dug into the Google cloud platform and I thought it was time to attempt a side-by-side comparison of my two favourite PaaS providers.
Some quick definitions are probably in order:
Force.com is a cloud computing platform as a service offering from Salesforce, the first of its kind allowing developers to build multi tenant applications that are hosted on their servers as a service.
Google App Engine is a platform for developing and hosting web applications in Google-managed data centers.
Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is an open source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain complex JavaScript front-end applications in Java.