Java portal and cloud user experience platform (UXP) company eXo has announced that its eXo Cloud IDE has added Cloud Foundry to its roster of supported Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings.

Developers deploying Java, Spring, Ruby, and other forms of applications to Cloud Foundry can now take advantage of cloud computing's proposition for increased agility.

Although cloud computing and PaaS offerings have been evolving for some time, eXo maintains that developers have not actually been able to build Java applications in the cloud. With eXo Cloud IDE, the concept is that developing and deploying Java apps becomes much more streamlined and makes cloud platforms more accessible to developers.

"Cloud IDE makes it possible for developers to collaborate on building Java applications in the cloud, apps that they can deploy directly to Cloud Foundry in minutes," said Benjamin Mestrallet, founder and CEO of eXo. "The code now lives in the cloud, accessible from virtually anywhere with a browser and Internet access — so creating an app and moving it into Cloud Foundry is now very easy."

The company says that its new Cloud IDE expands the options for developers. It is (in eXo's words) "the only" Development-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering to support Java application development, and the first to support Java Spring applications.

"It's the only offering that developers can use to build Java applications in a cloud-based IDE and deploy them directly to a PaaS. With the announcement of Cloud IDE as an on-ramp to Cloud Foundry, eXo Cloud IDE now supports a total of four PaaS environments. eXo has already announced eXo Cloud IDE support for CloudBees, Heroku, and Red Hat OpenShift," said the company, in a press statement.

Support for additional languages, frameworks, and PaaS environments is planned for the future.