First VMware made SpringSource's flavor of enterprise Java the programming environment for its teamup with Salesforce.com; then Rod Johnson proclaimed that you could build apps in that environment that had little to do with Salesforce.com's core CRM functionality. Now it seems like this was just a trial run for the big announcement at VMware's VMworld conference, about the VMware Cloud Application Platform, which has SpringSource's tc server at its core. Developers can write Java apps for the Spring Framework and have them run in a variety of cloud environments that VMware supports, all without having to worry about writing the plumbing code to run in a distributed environment.

Java developers who want to build cloud-savvy apps (or VMware-based-cloud-savvy apps, anyway) are pretty lucky, as they've been given pride of place in the virtualization giants app dev plans. I'm not sure if VMware gobbled up SpringSource because they thought Java was good fit technically for their platforms, or just because they wanted quick access to a very large base of developers. But VMware Cloud Application Platform isn't going to be only about Java forever: Johnson says that the platform will soon support PHP, Ruby, and even .Net languages. That shouldn't be a big surprise (though it is interesting that Johnson, a Java guy, is heading up the effort). Still, Java's prominent role in this is a nice reminder that the old platform's still got it.

On an unrelated note, I once idly speculated that SpringSource could be next for an Oracle lawsuit, since one might see the Spring Framework as having the same relationship with Java EE and Android has with Java ME. But Johnson seems very much not worried about this; indeed, he's pretty upbeat on the future of the platform even taking the lawsuit into consideration.