Java portal company eXo has announced a new Java-compliant web-based IDE for deployment of applications directly to several major Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings including CloudBees, Heroku, and Red Hat OpenShift.

Already HTML-, JavaScript-, Groovy-, PHP-, and Ruby-compliant, the new eXo Cloud IDE is essentially a multi-tenant, hosted development environment to enable social coding.

eXo defines social coding as the collaborative development of applications, gadgets, and mashups that can be deployed directly to a PaaS. eXo Cloud IDE is described as an easy "on-ramp" to PaaS deployments with a simplified drop-down menu control for deploying apps to Heroku and Red Hat OpenShift PaaS.

By leveraging Git repositories, the product allows developers to manage, edit, and redeploy changes from the PaaS menu. To deploy Java applications to CloudBees, developers build the apps using the CloudBees DEV@cloud service and deploy via the CloudBees RUN@cloud service.

"The primary goal of eXo Cloud IDE is to provide a cloud service where teams of developers can collaborate and build applications in the language they prefer, while also giving them the freedom and flexibility to deploy their applications to the different cloud platforms available in the market," said Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo founder and CEO. "With this announcement, we now support three different PaaS offerings and their distinct deployment models."

Java/JSP support has been enhanced to include support for standard Java classes (Servlets or POJOs) and Java Server Pages (JSP). Developers can create standard Java projects in the cloud and also test and deploy those projects directly to the cloud using Maven and Jenkins via CloudBees DEV@cloud capabilities. eXo Cloud IDE also allows developers write REST APIs in Groovy using the JAX-RS specification and store-structured data inside a Java Content Repository.

Additional PHP support also gives developers another option for writing applications. As with other languages supported by eXo Cloud IDE — including Ruby — every file has color syntaxing, outline, and auto code completion.