It’s day two at VMworld, and there’s big news coming from all sides. Of course, that includes big news from VMware itself. The company is announcing its VMware Cloud Application Platform, combining its Spring Java development framework with the new VMware vFabric.

The new products bring an integrated set of application services, including lightweight application servers, global data management, cloud-ready messaging, dynamic load balancing and application performance management. In a nutshell, the new VMware platform brings centralized set of tools for optimizing performance and portability across cloud environments.

“With the rise of virtualization and modern development frameworks, a fundamentally more productive and portable approach to delivering new applications has emerged,” said Rod Johnson, SVP of the Application Platform division of VMware. “We’re moving into an era where developers can build great applications and immediately deploy those applications onto a modern platform that provisions and configures itself on demand and intelligently runs and scales the application based on policy.”

Features of the new Spring Framework include:
Spring speeds development by more than 50% through developer tools and features that make it easy to create new applications that:

• Provide a rich, modern user experience across a range of platforms, browsers and personal devices
• Integrate applications using proven Enterprise Application Integration patterns, including batch processing
• Access data in a wide range of structured and unstructured formats
• Leverage popular social media services and cloud service API’s

The new platform stands to make VMware even more competitive in the space, though it’s also a move that questions the company’s position in relation to many of its partners. The new combo product is similar to Red Hat and JBoss, all streamlining the Java experience. With Red Hat and JBoss being primarily centered around open source ideals, analysts look to VMware for cues on its open source stance as well.

VMware has pretty much always taken an open source perspective, but its growing product portfolio could eventually step on a few partner toes, sparking discussions around their different goals and implementations with open source, cloud computing for the enterprise.