Gunnar Hillert's Blog: First explorations into SpringSource's CloudFoundry

I received my credentials last night for SpringSource's CloudFoundry and I am now in the process of going through the examples. Next, I plan to make some of my applications (home-projects) work on the cloud. The general documentation so far seems to be a still a bit scattered. Therefore, below I summarize all the documentation and resources I have used so far to immerse myself into the services provided by the CloudFoundry. Hopefully it provides a good starting point for you as well.

Background information

There are quite a few examples posted on GitHub, that are a tremendous help in getting started:

https://github.com/SpringSource/cloudfoundry-samples/

Deploy Applications to the cloud from within Eclipse (STS)

http://blog.springsource.com/2011/04/13/using-cloud-foundry-from-sts/

Deploy Applications to the cloud using the command line tool vmc

http://cloudfoundry.zendesk.com/entries/20012337-getting-started-guide-command-line-vmc-users

Spring Roo Support

http://www.springsource.org/roo/guide?w=base-cloud-foundry

Groovy/Grails

http://blog.springsource.com/2011/04/12/one-step-deployment-with-grails-and-cloud-foundry/

Further reading
Mark Fisher published a great general article covering both, the vmc command line tool and Eclipse:

http://blog.springsource.com/2011/04/12/cloud-foundry-for-spring-developers/

Make also sure you hit the forums:

http://cloudfoundry.zendesk.com/forums

And when you really want to look under the hood, take a look at the source code for CloudFoundry at:

http://cloudfoundry.org/

It seems like that when checking out CloudFoundry, it is also a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with Spring 3.1 (see this Spring blog post detailing some of the new features). While I think it is not strictly required it provides functionality that is quite useful for cloud deployment scenarios such as: