I have some very exciting news to announce today.  Cloud Foundry has been acquired by SpringSource and is being launched as SpringSource Cloud Foundry.  As a result, I am now a SpringSource employee, and I couldn't be more pleased.

Who would have guessed that my experiments two years ago with a then relatively obscure Amazon service called the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) would eventually lead to today's events?  Those early experiments that resulted in the Cloud Tools open-source project , then became the basis for my startup venture called Cloud Foundry, a Platform-as-a-Service offering that makes it very easy to deploy and manage Java applications on Amazon EC2.  Rod Johnson, CEO of SpringSource, approached me earlier this year, and after just a few conversations it became apparent that SpringSource + Cloud Foundry made perfect sense.

SpringSource is, of course, best known for the Spring framework, which also powers the Cloud Foundry application.  However, SpringSource also owns or contributes to a broad range of open-source and commercial technologies for building Java applications (e.g. Groovy/Grails and the Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite), running web applications (e.g. SpringSource tc Server and Apache HTTPD), and managing the IT infrastructure (e.g. Hyperic HQ).  Furthermore, SpringSource employs most of the founders and contributors to those great open-source technologies.  When you combine those SpringSource properties and the associated expertise with Cloud Foundry, the result is an extremely compelling and easy-to-use solution for building, running and managing Java web applications in the cloud.  And that great potential is why I chose to join SpringSource.

You can expect Cloud Foundry to offer powerful new features as we integrate deeper with SpringSource technologies. We took the first big step today. The launch of SpringSource Cloud Foundry at CloudFoundry.com deploys applications on the enterprise-grade SpringSource tc Server and integrates Hyperic technologies for monitoring. It also has a slick new UI that is as visually appealing as it is useful! I hope you will check out the new and improved Cloud Foundry and let me and my new SpringSource colleagues know what you think.

Last month I gave a couple of talks at Community One East in NY. One was about running Java applications on Amazon EC2. The other was about dynamically languages vs. static languages and why I am very interested in Scala, which is a modern programming language that is statically typed yet very expressive. In the presentation I talk about my experiences using Groovy (good and bad) and some of the interesting features of the Scala language.

 Here are the slides:

In May, I'll be giving a 1/2 day tutorial on running Java and Grails applications on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. This will be part of Skills Matter's Progressive Web Tutorials. Other tutorials at the event include Dojo Data, Grids, Charts and Comet by Dylan Schiemann, and Introduction to Adobe Flex by Peter Elst. This will be my first time giving a talk in my home country in a very, very long time and I am looking forward to it. I hope to see you there.

This is week 2 of a busy few weeks of events and presentations. Last week, I gave my first 1/2 day class on running Java applications on Amazon EC2. It went extremely well with a great turnout. Tonight in Oakland is the SF Bay Area Groovy/Grails meetup. Tomorrow, I am demoing Cloud Foundry at the SD Forum Cloud Services SIG in Palo Alto. And, next week I am giving a presentation on Java and Amazon EC2 at the SD Forum Java SIG.

In the rest of March there are the presentations I blogged about previously with one addition. At CommunityOne East in New York I am giving a second presentation: Dynamic Languages: the next big thing for the JVM or an evolutionary dead end? In this presentation I am going to describe my experiences writing Cloud Tools in Groovy and then compare Groovy with Scala, which is a rather interesting statically typed language.