Virtualization software maker VMware announced that it has updated its Spring expansions to support version 3.1 of the framework. The list includes Spring Integration, Spring Security, Spring Batch, Spring Data, Spring Mobile and Spring for Android.

Spring enables developers to integrate various components such as web services in enterprise Java-based environments, and has picked up a lot of support according to data cited by VMware in the release. Monthly downloads from Raven Central apparently increased by 40 percent, and the framework’s popularity level is at its all time high.

VMware posted some addition info by research firm Evans Data:

-Spring is the framework of choice among expert Java developers

– Spring developers report productivity and speed of deployment as the top two reasons they use Spring: 70 percent of Spring users report at least a 50 percent productivity gain by using Spring and 73 percent report that Spring allows them to deliver projects twice as fast.

–  More than two thirds of Java developers are either using Spring today  or plan to do so within the next two years

Spring is also seeing adoption within the Hadoop ecosystem, a key area of development for a company of its kind.

Back to VMware, the virtualization vendor is branching out. While supporting other budding ecosystems, the company is also at work strengthening its own, an area where it has done a rather good job to date.  A few of the resellers and various partners had product updates this week, some of which we picked up yesterday.

One of these is Blueblock, a data center operator and hosted service provider. Blueblock relies on vCloud to power its infrastructure and yesterday upgraded to the latest version (1.5,) in hopes of delivering its customer superior performance and reliability overall.  The gap between traditional datacenters and the cloud is narrowing – an observation quite a few pundits have noted on SiliconANGLE.tv.