Also at the symposium, Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring Framework and senior vice president at VMware, said the company's Code2Cloud tools suite, for cloud application development and deployment, is expected to be available in a beta release in May. "What it does is provide the linking between deployment destinations in the cloud and the developer desktop," Johnson said.

Anticipated for commercial release toward the end of this year, Code2Cloud initially will support Java and Ruby on Rails application development. PHP and Python support is eyed for an upgrade to the platform.

Interviewed at the conference, Engine Yard's Charles Nutter, a principal developer in charge of JRuby, said planning has begun on JRuby 1.7. JRuby is an is an implementation of the Ruby language for the Java Virtual Machine. With version 1.7, builders hope to add capabilities derived from Java Platform, Standard Edition 7, including invokeDynamic and NIO 2 (New IO).

"Invokedynamic will make it much faster for us to run Ruby code," Nutter said. "NIO 2 will add some file system APIs that let us do things that we've had to hack around before," Nutter said. .