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The Cloud Foundry team has announced a new release of the Cloud Foundry plug-in for Eclipse.
According to the team, this release of the plug-in serves as another major step in Cloud Foundry’s commitment to Java and Spring developers. With this update, the Cloud Foundry Eclipse plug-in now allows developers to connect to their data stored in the popular MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, directly from their integrated development environment (IDE) or command line, without changing their applications.
“In the course of developing, testing and deploying cloud applications, developers sometimes need to directly access the application data,” said Nieraj Singh, a member of the Cloud Foundry team in a blog post. “The Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse advances this capability and now features the ability to launch external command-line applications for Cloud Foundry services like MySQL and PostgreSQL. The plug-in offers Spring and Java developers using Eclipse or STS [Spring Tool Suite] a way to manipulate, or port the data contained in their Cloud Foundry applications more easily.”
An earlier release of the Cloud Foundry plug-in (1.1.0) introduced tunneling support for data services, and the command-line application feature in 1.4.0 now extends the support by automatically resolving tunnel values when launching a command-line application for a Cloud Foundry service, Singh said. “In addition, a set of predefined commands for executing commonly used command-line applications are available by default, and ready to use if the external command-line application is installed and set in the operating system’s PATH environment variable.”
These commands are launched from within Eclipse or STS, and executed in an external command-line terminal, Singh added. “New commands can be defined either through a new Eclipse preference page for Cloud Foundry, or by opening a “Service Tunnel Commands” wizard from the Services table in the Cloud Foundry Server editor,” he said. “The commands are stored as Eclipse preferences and therefore persisted across Eclipse runtime sessions.”
In July 2012 the team initially announced a new release of Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse, which featured the ability to open a tunnel to any Cloud Foundry data service. With that integration, Eclipse users could use familiar client applications to directly analyze, manipulate or port the data contained in their Cloud Foundry applications, Singh said in a blog post at the time.
The Cloud Foundry Data Tunneling service can be created from the “Services” table in the Cloud Foundry Eclipse server editor, Singh said. The new integration (version 1.1.0) allows users to create data tunneling (also known as Caldecott) from within Eclipse Indigo JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) or STS version 2.9.0 or higher.
The tunneling capability means developers using the popular Eclipse IDE can now use familiar client applications to directly analyze, manipulate or port the data contained in their Cloud Foundry applications. This marks another important step in making sure Cloud Foundry delivers the best developer experience and doesn’t force developers to change the way they create apps when moving to cloud, VMware officials said.
Singh said the process of creating a tunnel requires services to be bound to the tunneling application. Cloud Foundry will automatically stop a running Caldecott application, bind the service and restart the application to create the tunnel, he added. Therefore, existing tunnels may be closed when a new tunnel is created, if the desired service was not previously bound to the tunneling application. Multiple tunnels can be opened to different services in your account at the same time, as long as all the related services are already bound to the Caldecott application prior to creating the data tunnels, he said.