MS intros Napa tools for cloud apps

Cloud App Model for Office and SharePoint, CIO.IN reports.

Napa is a free, browser-based application for SharePoint available in a preview form. "Napa provides a lightweight, browser-based companion to the Visual Studio rich client and is a great way to get started with Office and SharePoint development without having to install anything onto your machine," said Microsoft corporate VP S Somasegar, in blog post.

Cloud App Model is Microsoft's mechanism for developing applications that combine Web technologies and cloud services within Office and SharePoint, said Microsoft's Jason Zander, corporate VP for the Visual Studio team, InfoWorld writes.

Napa is being unveiled in the wake of a public preview of Office and SharePoint 2013 this week. The upcoming Office platform focuses on cloud, touch and social capabilities.

"As we set out to create developer tools for the new Cloud App Model, we took a fresh look at the overall solution we wanted to give to our customers," Zander said. "We wanted to provide a lightweight, in-browser experience, so that you could quickly build your SharePoint or Office Web app in the same browser where they would run. Therefore, we created a first-class development environment called Napa as an online companion to Visual Studio."

According to ZDNet, because Napa is Web-based, developers won't need to install anything on their machines; they'll be able to start coding inside their browsers. But if and when Office developers need more "advanced" tools, they will be able to switch to Visual Studio 2012 and continue their work in that IDE, he said.