News

Code2Cloud: Tool Suite To Smooth Cloud Path for Java Devs

• By John K. Waters
• October 26, 2010

VMware announced a new suite of cloud-based application lifecycle management (ALM) tools, called Code2Cloud, at the annual SpringOne 2GX developer conference last week in Chicago.

Developed in partnership with Tasktop Technologies, Code2Cloud was designed for Spring developers and is being built on a number of open source projects, including the Eclipse Mylyn task management tool, the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) IDE, the Hudson continuous integration tool and the Git source control tool.

A Code2Cloud beta program is expected to launch later this year. Subscription pricing has not yet been announced.

VMware, which owns SpringSource, is billing Code2Cloud as a unified, setup-free development infrastructure delivered as a cloud service. Developers will be able to use Code2Cloud -- which will be delivered as a service -- for the entire build process, the company said. It will also allowa choice of Java cloud deployment destinations, either internal or public. And it will provides a new cloud-centric issue tracker that is compatible with the Bugzilla bug-tracking system, plus a dashboard for managing apps and dev teams.

Rod Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of VMware's SpringSource product division, SpringSource founder and writer of the first version of the Spring framework, sees the tools suite as a smoother path to the cloud for Java developers.

"We built this thing to help our developer community prepare for the cloud," Johnson told this site. "The idea is to bring the cloud to them with a complete set of development tools. It removes the distractions of configuring development environments, setting up code repositories, and continuous integration and allows them to focus on the business logic and writing great code. It's essentially another step along a path we've been following for the past decade, first with the SpringSource framework, and then with Grails and Roo, and then the Eclipse-based STS."

"For developers, it's all about the IDE," said Mik Kersten, founder and CEO of Tasktop Technologies. "They absolutely live in their development environments. So it makes sense to get them to the cloud through these tools."

Kersten is the creator of the Eclipse Mylyn open source framework for integrating task and ALM tools with the Eclipse IDE. Mylyn is a "task-focused interface" designed to reduce the information overload developers often face. It does this by extending the GUI metaphor and showing only a subset of the content that is relevant to the task-at-hand, with the aim that developers can then spend less time spent searching for information and more time coding.

Code2Cloud will be extensible to other ALM solutions, Kersten added, through its implementation of the Eclipse Mylyn framework and the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) Web service standard. It leverages the Tasktop Certified ecosystem of Agile and ALM integrations, which ensures interoperability with existing ALM tools and support for best-of-breed Agile technologies, he said. 

"The software development tool chain has always been tedious to setup and integrate," said Red Monk analyst Michael Cote in a statement. "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 attempt at 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."

Developers can sign up for "developer preview" of the suite, scheduled to launch in the first quarter of next year, here.