21 October 2010, 17:08

VMware to close the gap between cloud development and the ALM world

At this year's SpringOne 2GX conference, VMware presented a prototype of a tool suite for the development of applications in the cloud. Called Code2Cloud, the product is being developed in collaboration with Tasktop Technologies, the vendor of the Eclipse based Mylyn integration management technology. Code2Cloud, which will be distributed by the VMware subsidiary SpringSource, is based on a number of open source technologies that have been put together to create a development infrastructure as a cloud service.

In addition to Mylyn, it contains the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) development environment, the Git distributed version control system, the Hudson continuous integration tool and a new issue tracker compatible with Bugzilla. VMware therefore now offers a number of helpful application life cycle and development tools with cloud support. Rod Johnson, head of SpringSource, says the collaboration with Tasktop Technologies continues the success story of other Spring projects (Spring Framework, Grails, and Spring Roo), although the focus here is on Application Life cycle Management (ALM).

Additionally, Mylyn, Tasktop's commercial version of Eclipse, and the implementation of Open Services for Life cycle Collaboration (OSLC) allow the integrations already supported by Tasktop to be used with other ALM and common project management products for agile software development within the cloud. Once Code2Cloud development is completed, Tasktop also plans to offer services.

Applications developed with Code2Cloud can be supplied as private or public applications running on cloud platforms such as VMforce (jointly developed by VMware and Salesforce) and Google Apps. Code2Cloud provides a development overview through a graphical display that visualises the progress of projects and the work being done by development teams. VMware plans to make a preview version available to developers in the first quarter of 2011, initially via the free SpringSource Tool Suite integrated in Eclipse. For the time being, Java is supported, with other languages to be added.

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