VMware plans to offer a hosted development environment that should ease the deployment of applications to cloud environments, the company announced Tuesday.
“We put a lot of thought into how to help Java developers get to cloud computing,” said Rod Johnson, who is senior vice president and general manager of VMware’s SpringSource product division.
The offering will not be available until 2011, though the company is demonstrating a prototype of the service at the SpringOne G2X developer conference Tuesday in Chicago.
The free service, which Johnson calls “a deployment portal” will “provide the missing link between the IDE [integrated developer environment] on the desktop and cloud deployments,” he said.
Today, that process of developing a freshly written application to the cloud is a fragmented one, Johnson said. There is no direct linkage between the in-house development process and the testing and deployment process taking place across the network, he said.
“Where do you track your source code? Where do you track your issues? Where do you do continuous integration builds? The developers are on their own,” Johnson said.
Called Code2Cloud, the new service will offer a complete development environment, as well as ways to easily deploy applications on private clouds or on public clouds such as the VMware/Salesforce joint offering VMforce, or on Google Apps.
Application lifecycle management software provider Tasktop Technologies also helped in the development of Code2Cloud. The Code2Cloud service will be comprised of a number of development tools: The SpringSource Tool Suite IDE, Git source control software, Tasktop’s Mylyn task management Eclipse plug-in, the Hudson integration tool, and a new issue tracking service compatible with Bugzilla.
The VMware service also offers a dashboard for overseeing the progress of projects and development teams.
The service will initially be available through the company’s free SpringSource Tool Suite software, or through an Eclipse plug-in. A developer can start a project within the IDE, and, in the cloud, the project is provided with source control management, continuous integration management, and bug and issue tracking support.
“With Code2Cloud, once the developer fixes a defect within Eclipse, the hosted code is instantly built, tested and deployed. Any issues detected at runtime immediately show in the issue tracker and IDE with the full context of the failure,” said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies, in a statement.
Java will be the first language supported with the offering, though over time VMware may add more languages, Johnson said.