VMware’s SpringSource Ecosystem

As mentioned in my previous piece I’ve been doing some prototyping using SpringSource’s Grails. Grails can be thought of as the top of the stack. If you pick up Grails you would naturally pull in the other pieces of SpringSource, including vFabric and ultimately vFoundry. In a future post I will deal with what happens when you stick Grails onto vFoundry, but at this stage I’ve been assessing the health of the SpringSource Ecosystem.

VMworld from an Open Source Perspective

VMworld is clearly the largest dedicated virtualization conference, and yet from an Open Source perspective it is slightly disappointing because the VMware ecosystem naturally attracts proprietary software vendors, and also some of the more interesting activities in Open Source are through multi-vendor foundations which do not have the same marketing budgets as vendors themselves.

Nevertheless, there are a number of key Open Source players, and some interesting smaller players, represented at VMworld.

Development Tools and Application Servers for the Cloud

Development tools like Eclipse and Visual Stuio are being built to ensur applications can be deployed in to the cloud on application servers. Key challenges include the manageability and scalability of application servers. Innovations include the use of non-java languages like Groovy and Jython and even PHP and Javascript on JVMs, and the final demise of SQL as object caches offer more natural scalability.