Executive Summary

Infiflex believes that the rise of cloud computing carries with it the potential to be one of the most game-changing developments in the world of computing in the past two decades. Not since the paradigm shift from mainframes to personal computing or the advent of the World Wide Web itself, has such a major change in worldview occurred in the information technology sector. Today’s forward thinking CIOs are already approaching building and deploying custom applications and objects via cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) models. PaaS services bundle all stack components (hardware, infrastructure, storage) together with security, work-flow, database, and user interfaces that allow users to create and deploy powerful applications, websites, and mobile applications. Since the standard has moved away from in-house, high-maintenance, server architecture models, to remotely hosted, “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) models, this new way of doing things comes with its own set of challenges. This white paper compares the Giffy tool set, which utilizes the Rapid Application Development process, to traditional development tools. Giffy is an add-on to the Google App Engine Application Programming Interface (API), which allows users to develop applications quickly that are not only scalable using Google Apps, but simple to develop.