VMWare Teams Up With Google and Tasktop For Simpler Cloud Computing

At this year's Google I/O, Google and VMWare announced a collaboration to make building applications for the cloud as simple as possible. Last week on the Google Web Toolkit blog, Google announced a release candidate version of the tools that will give developers a headstart into cloud computing.

According to Rod Johnson 

    "Together, Google and VMware enable enterprises to develop and deploy rich Spring Java applications across multiple clouds and devices."

   
There are three key parts that help to improve developer productivity:

• Spring Roo with GWT
  Spring Roo has already established itself as a great tool to get a web application together from scratch in very little time. Now that it's possible to create GWT based applications from Spring Roo, developers can generate a richer user interface faster.
• Spring Insight and Google Speed Tracer
  Once your application has been deployed onto the cloud, you'll want to debug it for performance issues. While Speed Tracer provides a view to your web application performance, the addition of Spring Insight allows you to drill down even further
• SpringSource Tool Suite and Google Plugin for Eclipse
  Bringing the Google Plugin for Eclipse into the existing SpringSource Tool Suite gives developers the tools they need to create large scale, end to end solutions.

Cloud development is made even easier with VMWare's new Code2Cloud  service, which was also announced at SpringOne last week. Working with Tasktop, and leveraging the tooling mentioned above, the concept is that everything from application creation to release can be done without any configuration, and all from the comfort of your IDE. With builds hosted in the cloud, all activity on the project can be viewed from the web, including commits, builds and source code changes made.

One of the most striking aspects of Code2Cloud is how Spring Insight and Tasktop's Mylyn framework have been integrated together. As Spring Insight finds performance issues in your running application, it can create tasks in your issue tracker, which is connected up to Mylyn. Normally you need to set up your tasks with associated source files for the task context, but on Code2Cloud, Spring Insight helps to prepopulate the context based on the affected source files.

See the following video for more details: 

Code2Cloud includes a combinations of Git for version control, Hudson for continuous integration, Bugzilla for issue tracking and Mylyn as the task focused interface.