Today at the SpringOne 2GX developer conference, VMware announced with Google an early November 2010 'general availability' of their collaborative projects that aim to move Java-based cloud development forward by bringing Spring Roo to Google Web Toolkit, integrating Spring Insight with Google Speed Tracer, and incorporating Google Plugin for Eclipse into the SpringSource Tool Suite.
Coming just over five months after initial announcements of a Google/VMWare partnership, this milestone signifies the first in what the companies state as a series of "technology collaborations to make enterprise software developers more efficient at building, deploying and managing applications within any cloud environment on any device".
Core to the release is full support for the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) within the Spring Roo productivity tool set. As recently covered by InfoQ, developers can leverage Roo's light-weight rapid application development stack to greatly automate and speed up much of the work involved in creating, building, and enhancing their GWT web applications.
Taking this up a notch, integration of the Google Plugin for Eclipse, which provides GWT-centric Eclipse tooling and Google App Engine support, with the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite brings advanced tooling to the hands of web developers. As stated on the GWT blog, this combination "makes it easy for developers to build and maintain large scale, web-based, enterprise applications, putting tools that were previously only available when building desktop and server solutions in the hands of those building cutting edge web apps".
Watch Roo's founder Ben Alex demonstrate it's capabilities (or watch him one on one with InfoQ), and get started with GWT, Roo, STS, and the Google Plugin with a simple walk-thru from Google.
Also key to the upcoming release is the integration of VMware’s Spring Insight performance tracing technology with Google’s Speed Tracer to enable end to end performance visibility of cloud applications built using Spring and GWT. Speed Tracer gives the developer a tool for determining where CPU time is spent within the browser process, while Insight provides a detailed, timed "back-end" view of each step the request took on its round-trip through the server(s) - the integration brings this information together into one combined dashboard view. One point of apparent criticism to note is Insight's current coupling to the SpringSource tc Server app server, although Dustin Mallory appears to have come up with a way to get around this limitation.
Next steps and upcoming plans apparently center around mobile web app technology. Google’s product manager for developer tools Brad Abrams said this:
Moving forward, both [VMWare and Google] teams are excited about the strides we can make in the mobile web app space. As it stands today, the current technology stack makes it possible to create optimized web apps targeted for the mobile browser. Longer term, we will be looking at incorporating mobile best practices, styled UIs, and HTML5 features such as app cache, local database storage, and geolocation to make the developer and end-user experience first class.
Keep an eye out here for an interview by InfoQ's Ryan Slobojan yesterday with Abrams about this announcement, the tools, and more.