Today at the SpringOne 2GX developer conference, VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, announced a complete suite of cloud-based development and collaboration tools aimed at simplifying the entire application development process. Developed in partnership with Tasktop Technologies, the leader in task-focused development and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration solutions, Code2Cloud builds on leading open source development projects to deliver a completely unified, setup-free development infrastructure — delivered as a cloud service.
Code2Cloud allows developers to focus on what’s important; business logic and writing great code. By removing the distractions of configuring development environments, setting up code repositories and continuous integration and seamlessly incorporating issue tracking systems, Code2Cloud removes much of the complexity and headaches from the application development process. Code2Cloud is delivered as a service with no setup, no hardware or software to manage to the more than 2.5 million members of the SpringSource developer community.
“For the past decade, SpringSource has always focused on improving developer productivity — from the creation of the Spring framework and our rapid application development tools, Grails and Roo, to the most complete Eclipse-based IDE, SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) to the vFabric(TM) cloud application platform. Now, along with Tasktop Technologies, SpringSource will bring the same innovation to application lifecycle tools,” said Rod Johnson, SVP and General Manager of VMware’s SpringSource product division. “To help our developer community prepare for the cloud, we are bringing the cloud to them with a complete set of development tools — to make every developer more productive.”
Taking advantage of the cloud for development infrastructure is a great first step for developers and IT organizations to move forward with their public cloud strategy. While developers and application owners will be able to use Code2Cloud for the entire build process, it also enables a choice of Java cloud deployment destinations; easily targeted at internal infrastructure, or public PaaS offerings, like the enterprise-ready VMforce(TM), a joint offering between VMware and Salesforce.
“The software development tool chain has always been tedious to setup and integrate,” said Red Monk analyst Michael Cote. “While cloud-based development promises to make application delivery, deployment, and use easier, I haven’t seen excellent unified application management approaches that take full advantage of cloud. VMware’s SpringSource Code2Cloud is an ambitious step towards moving much of the development management stack into the cloud and hopefully vacuuming up those tedious application management tasks. It’ll be fun to watch this idea evolve as more and more people and applications start taking advantage of cloud computing.”
Code2Cloud builds on leading open source projects including Eclipse Mylyn task management, SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) IDE, Hudson continuous integration and Git source control. It provides a new cloud-centric issue tracker that is compatible with the popular Bugzilla bug tracking system, as well as a dashboard for managing applications and development teams. The solution leverages the Tasktop Certified ecosystem of Agile and ALM integrations, ensuring interoperability with existing ALM tools and support for best-of-breed Agile technologies.
“Developers live and breathe inside their IDE,” said Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop Technologies. “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, ensuring an unprecedented degree of integration between the running application and the day-to-day activity of the development team.”
Between the open source Spring ecosystem and now Code2Cloud, developers have a destination for their tooling, their programming model, their deployment destination and now their application lifecycle tools. Much like the Spring Framework allowed enterprises to leverage their existing investments in software infrastructure but provided modern developer friendly tools to access that infrastructure, Code2Cloud will be highly extensible to other Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solutions via its implementation of the Eclipse Mylyn framework and of the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) web service standard.
Availability
Code2Cloud is scheduled to be available as a developer preview in the first quarter of 2011.