A couple of years ago I blogged about the work we'd done to integrate Workstation with the Eclipse IDE. A few months after that I happened to fall into conversation with one of our partnership engineers while taking the shuttle to work. Hearing about the Eclipse plugin I'd written, he grew excited at the prospect of partnering with Java tools developers to build on this foundation. Over the next few months we chatted about this casually, tossing around various ideas. And then one day he came to me with a concrete proposition: a company called SpringSource was interested in working with us on this front.
SpringSource is well-known in the Java world and we felt it would be beneficial to customers of both companies if they could leverage the power of virtualization in their development process. To that end, a bunch of people from both companies got together a couple of times to hash out the technical, legal and business details of such a partnership. SpringSource assigned one of their excellent developers, Christian DuPuis, to the project and two of us from VMware agreed to help him get started using the Java bindings we'd created for the VIX API that lets 3rd-party software manipulate VMs.
This week the fruits of these efforts finally came to bear when we announced the preliminary results of this collaborative work. I hope that Java developers are excited about what we have in the works for them.
