The Cloud Foundry team released a new version of Micro Cloud FoundryTM including streamlined offline support, Java debugging, up-to-date versions of all languages/frameworks and services as supported on CloudFoundry.com and ability to enable/disable application services.

Ruby and Rails developers can now remotely access the popular rails console using the Cloud Foundry command line tool (VMC). This new feature enables inspection of the Cloud Foundry Runtime App environment, troubleshooting application issues in runtime, and even the ability to modify data “on the fly” for one-off admin tasks. Using the new vmc rails-console command, developers can target any Cloud Foundry instance, including the upcoming release of Micro Cloud Foundry.

As the platform matures, we see many cool applications being built on top of Cloud Foundry. This is the first in a series of guest blog posts by application developers explaining what their application does, how it is architected, what they like in Cloud Foundry and what needs to be improved.

ThemaTweets2012 allows you to visualize what people say about the french elections candidates on Twitter, how these candidates relate to key themes of this 2012 event and analyze information under several angles.

Previously, developers had to put a lot of energy into preserving choice across operating systems and minimizing hard dependencies on specific operating systems. In the cloud era, there is a similar challenge to preserve choice across clouds and minimize dependencies on specific clouds.

Most PaaS solutions today force you to write your application to that specific PaaS and that is where your app will stay, much like writing to an OS. It sits on a public cloud somewhere and cannot be moved without recoding and dependency swaps. In extreme cases, you as a developer are still directly tied to the constraints of the infrastructure.

The popular Java reporting engine from JasperSoft is now available as a Cloud Foundry package. With two simple commands developers can make JasperReports Server available on Cloud Foundry and build powerful reports querying Cloud Foundry data services. Deploying JasperReport server using the Cloud Foundry command line tool (‘VMC’) is as simple as ‘vmc push’ and ‘vmc bind-service’.