Oracle may own the Java trademark, but VMware is touting its own Spring framework as the best programming model for enterprise Java developers.

The enterprise variant of Java faced off against the Spring Framework this week in a debate over which one developers should use for Java application development.

VMware director of global partner strategy and operations, Douglas Smith, and local vice-president, Paul Harapin, were keynote speakers at the vendor’s recent A/NZ Partner Exchange. The pair caught up with NADIA CAMERON to discuss how it plans to strengthen the bond between the vendor and its channel base, as well as how competencies, acquisitions and vendor alliances are affecting the partner community.

The VMforce cloud platform in development by VMware and Salesforce.com will be most useful for customers with existing Salesforce deployments, but can technically be used to build any Java application, a VMware official says.

VMware's SpringSource is acquiring database-caching software company GemStone Systems, the company announced Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The new version of the Groovy programming language aims to make life easier for programmers who work with Java and SQL, the language's developers note.

Java framework builder SpringSource is set to provide enterprise Java developers a platform for cloud-based deployments with the unveiling on Tuesday of SpringSource Cloud Foundry.

VMware will gain a substantial footprint in enterprise Java application development with its pending acquisition of SpringSource, which was announced Monday. But the virtualization giant may follow up that move -- made in support of a new PaaS (platform as a service) cloud-computing strategy -- by investing in distributed caching technology, a class of middleware that boosts application performance and scalability.