VMforce Mixes Java Application Development with Cloud Infrastructure

by Cameron Sturdevant

(provided by Salesforce) Here you see a screen shot of the VMforce console. Very neat and tidy. Notice the four applications shown under “All Applications.”

VMforce is an appeal to enterprise Java developers. Never seen in the marketing slicks but central to the platform demonstration was this romp through the application development guts.

To save time, much of this project was built before the demonstration, according to remarks by Spring’s originator, Rod Johnson. While he used the word “easy” innumerable times in the demonstration, what he likely meant was that much of the repetitive, boring work of creating a new Java app has been reduced when using VMware’s Spring development environment.

The contact application was dragged onto the VMforce cloud and controlled from the VMforce console. During the demonstration there appeared to be a slight glitch before the application actually started running.

Here you see the output from a Java application developed in Spring and pulling data from Salesforce via VMforce.

Spring Travel is a sample application that uses the core Spring framework along with some related projects in the platform, including Spring Security and Spring Web flow. Here you see it integrated with Salesforce Chatter.

The demo focused on making a travel reservation for a single business traveler. It jumped to this performance dashboard for hotel bookings that would be used by accounting to understand overall corporate travel spending.

During the demo, the developers stuck Salesforce Chatter onto the travel system. Chatter is a Facebook-like internal collaboration application. Here you see Parker Harris asking his co-workers where to stay when in New York.