News

Pivotal Launches Lightweight Java Web Stack

• By John K. Waters
• August 13, 2014

Pivotal Software has assembled a number of its open-source application development technologies and combined them with three of its commercial products into a new lightweight Java Web application stack called the Pivotal App Suite. The suite brings together Web and Java application servers, cross-platform asynchronous messaging components, in-memory data caching services and current innovations in JVM-based application development.

The San Francisco-based EMC/VMware spinoff that took over the Spring product line is a highly developer-focused organization, says Randy MacBlane, vice president of the company's Engineering for Pivotal Application Fabric group (home of all these products), and the company was looking for a way to simplify the consumption of these technologies for software makers.

"We've recognized how people use these technologies for application development," MacBlane told ADTmag. "And we see the elements of the App Suite as natural stepping stones to what we think is the next generation of app development -- these DevOps-, PaaS-, cloud-oriented development environments."

MacBane describes the App Suite is a platform based on open standards for developing and deploying modern, scalable applications. It combines eight open-source projects -- the Spring IO platform, the Apache Tomcat Web server and servlet container; the RabbitMQ message broker; the Redis in-memory, key value data store; the Reactor foundational framework for asynchronous applications on the JVM; the Apache HTTP Server, the Groovy JVM language, and the Grails webapp framework for the JVM -- with the Pivotal tc Server, the Pivotal RabbitMQ, and the Pivotal Web Server.

Pivotal may be developer-focused, but it's got a Big Data/PaaS perspective. It's Pivotal One flagship product combines a set of application and data services that run on top of Pivotal CF, which is a turnkey platform-as-a-service solution for Agile development teams building and managing software on private clouds. The Spring IO platform, announced last year, contains all the frameworks and runtimes from Spring.io, including Spring Boot, Spring XD, Spring Batch, Spring Integration, Spring Security, and the Spring Tool Suite, among others.

The company is offering three licensing models for the App Suite based on compute environments: physical, bare-metal computing environments; private virtualized and cloud computing environments; and public cloud IaaS computing environments, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine.