Shouldn’t Oracle Be Doing This?
So VMware and Salesforce’s heralded little secret is a joint Java cloud for developers. A little off the beaten tract for Salesforce whose own widgetry is based on a proprietary Apex language and who isn’t exactly in the developer-catering business but a sensible, non-competitive infrastructure consort for VMware, who’s got to justify its odd $420 million acquisition of SpringSource, the open source-based Java framework, and latch onto the developer base before it drifts off to Azure or some other cloud.

It’s called the first mission-critical deployment environment for enterprise Java apps in the cloud. It’s still in the oven though and won’t be available as developer preview until later this year when pricing will be announced.

This “enterprise” cloud will be called VMforce and will ride on Salesforce’s Force.com platform. The two companies say they’re both going to sell and support the thing, targeting the six million-odd Java developers that are supposed to be out there, including the two million-odd developers using the Spring framework, and get them building so-called Cloud 2 apps that are social – or at least collaborative – and work on any mobile device like the iPad in real-time.

They say VMforce will “dramatically simplify how enterprises and enterprise Java developers can harness the economics of cloud computing without compromising the flexibility, control and choice they require.”

According to a canned statement attributed to VMware CEO Paul Maritz, “Companies are looking for solutions that deliver the benefits of cloud computing while leveraging existing resources, expertise and infrastructure. By creating a dramatically simplified solution for modern application development, VMforce is a significant step forward in offering our customers a path that bridges existing internal investments with the resources and flexibility of the cloud.”

VMforce is supposed to support standard Java code, such as plain old Java objects (POJOs), Java Server Pages (JSPs) and Java servlets, through the Spring Framework. Java apps built with Spring promise to be easy to port to VMforce and vice versa. VMforce is supposed to make them scale automatically.

It’s also supposed to be global and obviously provide a vSphere-based virtualization platform as well as orchestration and management technology, a relational cloud database, a development platform and collaboration services, application run-time, development framework and tooling.

Naturally Red Hat, which wants to compete with VMware, thinks JBoss is a better app development platform for the cloud, that it is easier, seamless, has a broader user base, and a broader range of apps can be developed.

VMforce will use the Spring Framework and the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite. VMforce apps will run on the tc Server run-time, the enterprise version of Apache Tomcat, the lightweight application server that’s supposed to optimized for virtual and cloud environments.

As part of Force.com, the apps will have access to Salesforce’s newfangled Chatter Services, its Facebook-like collaboration widgetry. And as part of Force.com, developers will have access to its pre-built business services that can be configured into their apps without any custom coding, stuff like search, identity and security, workflow, reporting and analytics, a Web Services integration API and mobile deployment.

VMware’s vCloud technology is supposed to automatically manage the software stack that powers VMforce applications. It’s called the Java applications’ onramp to the cloud, automating their wiring to the Force.com database and managing the underlying vSphere virtualization platform.