Pivotal, the EMC- and VMware-backed spin-off with former VMware CEO Paul Maritz at the helm, unveiled Spring IO, a platform for developers on the popular Java framework Spring.

Pivotal is a major sponsor of the open-source framework. The company made the announcement at the Platform conference in Santa Clara, California, Monday.

The event, sponsored by Pivotal, IBM and GE (also a Pivotal backer), is focused around Cloud Foundry, the Pivotal-sponsored open-source Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) project. Platform was held in conjunction with SpringOne 2GX, a conference built around the Spring framework.

Adrian Colyer, CTO of application fabric at Pivotal, said Spring IO ushered in a new era for Spring. “It features significant new capabilities for developers that will increase productivity, decrease time to production through integrated DevOps capabilities and enable new classes of applications exploiting big data, analytics and mobile.”

In addition to the platform, the Spring IO release includes a “Foundation” portion, which is a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) and embeddable runtime components to enable developers to build applications for a wide range of enterprise requirements. There is also Spring IO Execution, which provides direct execution support for applications built on IO Foundation.

Finally, the Spring IO Website has been modernized to take a use-case oriented approach to exploring the platform.

Spring's “angle” is its focus on infrastructure at the application level. The framework takes infrastructure for enterprise applications into consideration to allow developers to focus on application-level business logic.

On the Spring website, the open-source framework is described as a “first-class citizen” on platforms that support Java: Heroku, Google App Engine, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk and Cloud Foundry.