Three Pitches

Last week, I got three developer-oriented PR pitches for coverage. None of them got me fired up right away, so let me put it to you: do you want to hear more about any of this stuff?

First, there was Backbase. They have been pricing their AJAX framework kits, which my esteemed colleague Peter Wayner reviewed favorably last November, at $6,000 per CPU for the Client Edition, and $8,000 per CPU for the JSF and Struts editions. That’s pretty steep unless you’re an Enterprise. Now they’re offering any edition at $2,000 per developer seat, which includes a runtime license for two CPUs.

Does that whet your interest? Why or why not?

Then, there was salesforce.com. Peter Coffee wrote to let me know what their Spring ’07 release includes AppSpace, “a facility for building customer-facing portals using AppExchange applications and other assets built on the Apex platform.” Peter says that “this is a real game-changer for quickly creating and deploying a customer-facing Web presence with a scalable On Demand infrastructure.”

Are customer-facing portals important to you? If so, would AppSpace make you want to jump on the salesforce.com bandwagon?

I couldn’t actually get the CODESTATION link to work, but I was able to find IBM CODESTATION by name and teleport there from within Second Life, once I registered and logged in. IBM says that they are “helping developers form social networks to work together more collaboratively and accelerate the software development process.”

Are you looking for a new social network for programming? If so, does either of these IBM initiatives appeal to you?

Let me know how you feel about any of these pitches by leaving a comment here.