Java cloud hosting platform company Jelastic has announced its integration with the Eclipse IDE for Java development. The Jelastic plug-in for Eclipse is intended to facilitate development and deployment of Java EE projects on the platform as developers can manage their deployments and hosting environments without switching between the IDE and the browser.

The company insists that the key priority for Jelastic's creators is to make cloud hosting of Java applications "as easy as possible" — and so this is why the platform supports integration with the most popular build systems (Maven, Ant, Hudson, and Jenkins) and can now be integrated with Eclipse.

A special plug-in for Eclipse makes development of Java EE web applications on the Jelastic platform much more convenient, since the developer can now log in to Jelastic and deploy the app in the cloud right from Eclipse.

The Jelastic plug-in for Eclipse provides the developer with the ability to manage (start, stop, and so on) user environments; the ability to deploy Eclipse projects to Jelastic; and the option to access server log files, and much more.

All these functions are available from the Eclipse interface. Why is this so important? Even though the Jelastic platform is designed to be very simple and user-friendly, it still can be distracting and inconvenient to constantly switch between Eclipse and a browser. For many Java developers, Eclipse is at the core of their activities, so they may well appreciate the opportunity to deploy an app in the cloud right from a familiar IDE.