IBM, Pivotal collaborate on tools for app development

IBM is collaborating with Pivotal to make its software easier to access within Spring, Pivotal's open-source framework, as well as on Pivotal Cloud Foundry cloud platforms.

The idea is to help developers quickly and easily build cloud-native applications and microservices using their preferrred framework and tools, Andrew Hoyt, director of development for IBM Cloud Integration, said in a blog post. Spring is one of the most popular frameworks for developing Java applications, and the collaboration was announced at Pivotal's annual developer conference.

Specifically, IBM and Pivotal announced:

• Beginning this week, Open Liberty (IBM's open source version of WebSphere Application Server) will be available as an alternative embedded container for Spring Boot.
• Spring developers will be able to deploy applications into Pivotal Cloud Foundry public or private clouds, as well as IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Private.
• The IBM WebSphere Liberty build-pack, an environment for running Java applications, is supported on the Pivotal Cloud Foundry platform.
• IBM software, including WebSphere Liberty and the MQ application messaging software, will be supported running on the Pivotal Container Service (PKS)

IBM has taken a series of recent steps to support open innovation. The company is a founding member of the Eclipse MicroProfile project, which is defining common APIs and infrastructure for creating microservices applications without vendor lock in. IBM also helped launch Itsio, an open source service that gives developers a vendor-neutral way to manage networks of different microservices on cloud platforms.