News

CloudBees Releases Eclipse Toolkit for Java Developers

• By John K. Waters
• July 8, 2011

Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company CloudBees wants to give Java jocks a more integrated process for developing, building and deploying their cloud applications. The best way to do that, says Harpreet Singh, the company's senior director of product management, is with the new CloudBees Toolkit for Eclipse -- a plug-in that supports the Jenkins open-source continuous integration server (CI) and application deployment directly into the Eclipse IDE.

"A lot of Java developers are still trying to figure out what the cloud is and how they can use it," Singh said. "The first thing people tell them is to set up something on, say, Google App Engine or Amazon E3, and then they're dealing with all these keys and going back and forth, and that's no good for their productivity. With this IDE, we have abstracted all of that away. There's no difference between running it locally and running it on the cloud. Developers should be free to focus on writing code and building great apps, not setting up an app server or switching between apps to get their code out the door."

CloudBees is best known as one of the few providers of a Java-based PaaS. The Boston-based company's flagship platform comprises two products: DEV@cloud, a service designed to allow developers to take their build and test environments to the cloud, and RUN@cloud, a traditional deployment PaaS designed to allow dev teams to deploy their applications to production on the cloud.

DEV@cloud comes with, Jenkins, which recently forked from Hudson. In fact, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who created Hudson and instigated the Jenkins fork, is an elite developer and architect at CloudBees. Earlier this year, disagreements about Oracle's decision to migrate the project to its java.net infrastructure, along with Oracle's decision to trademark the Hudson name, led community members to vote to rename the project "Jenkins" and move the code from java.net to GitHub. Shortly thereafter, Oracle surprised the community by contributing the Hudson code, domain name and trademark to the Eclipse Foundation in May.

The CloudBees Toolkit for Eclipse, launched today, uses the company's SVN and Git source repositories to form an integrated develop-to-deploy environment. Users can create and connect to Jenkins jobs on the DEV@cloud service and on on-premise Jenkins. The new Eclipse plug-in also allows users to monitor these jobs as they execute, and to incrementally deploy applications to the RUN@cloud PaaS for shared user testing, staging, or production release.

"Essentially, we're blurring the lines between the desktop and the cloud for developers," said Bob Bickel, a CloudBees advisor and board member.

The company also announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Solutions Member. "We understand that a lot of developers are on Eclipse, and we want to go where developers are and remove all the friction points, wherever they might be," said Singh.

The CloudBees Toolkit for Eclipse can be downloaded now There's also an instructional video available on YouTube.