VMwares Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service team has announced a new release of Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse, which features the ability to open a tunnel to any Cloud Foundry data service.
With the new integration, Eclipse users can use familiar client applications to directly analyze, manipulate or port the data contained in their Cloud Foundry applications, said Nieraj Singh, a member of the Cloud Foundry team, in a blog post.
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 or SpringSource Tool Suite (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.
Meanwhile, Using the service tunnel information, database connections can then be created with the Eclipse Data Source Explorer, which is available by default in STS and Eclipse Indigo JEE installations, Singh said.
Cloud Foundry Integration for Eclipse 1.1.0 can be installed or updated from the official update site: http://dist.springsource.com/release/TOOLS/cloudfoundry/