VMWare to acquire SpringSource

I found myself doing a double-take as I skimread the Twitter feeds this evening. VMWare to acquire SpringSource - hey, hey what the?

Rod Johnson has blogged about it, and this time it's not April fools day so there may be some truth behind it.

I wonder what this means for other virtualisation and cloud computing providers?

For instance, will this influence the direction of Grails support for Google App Engine? After all, it didn't take long for Grails to do an about turn and support Tomcat instead of Jetty as its default servlet engine after G2One was acquired by SpringSource.

I know there's a heatwave on, but where's my cloud gone?

Thursday was not a good day to be deploying updates to my hobby application on Google's App Engine.

Early in the day I had been making some good progress with refactoring my client UI, and adding some intelligence to the server side for allowing game rules to start to take effect, but by mid-afternoon I noticed that I was unable to redeploy my application.

Secure in the knowledge that nothing of signicance had changed at my end, I continued to work offline - on paper even - for some design considerations that needed to be addressed soon anyway.

All going well, I should have something fully functional by the weekend.

My original plan of using Javascript for the client didn't feel right, as it didn't look particularly pretty even after a fair amount of fiddling around with CSS. So, I have gone down the Java Applet path with a Swing UI. Next version may even use JavaFX.