Cloud Foundry and its related tool set are designed to support the needs of the new generation of application developers, who want to use whatever development language best suits the needs of their project and who often need to develop for multiple platforms, including both public and private clouds, says VMware VP of Cloud and Application Services Jerry Chen (full video recap coming soon).

The problem that VMware saw with the existing development platforms is that they only supported one  language – Ruby, Java, Python – and only one cloud platform, Chen said in an interview in The Cube at VMworld 2011. But that no longer reflects how developers work and what they need to do, he told Wikibon Chief Analyst David Vellante and SiliconAngle CEO John Furrier.

“Ten years ago development was controlled from the top, and companies would say, ‘We’re a  Java house’, or ‘We’re a Python house.’ But starting about five years ago the power shifted to the developers, and today they use whatever language makes them most productive on the project they are working on at the time.” So a platform that only supports one language doesn’t meet their needs.

And, he says, today they need to develop for multiple platforms – public and private, Amazon and VMware, “including the Microcloud that runs on your laptop.”

That is why Cloud Foundry was developed as an open source platform without built-in limits. And, he says, it has worked. Over the past four months since it was announced, multiple third-parties have added support for more languages to it, expanding its usefulness.

And next, he said, they will start adding support for more cloud environments, which is why Cloud Boundary was designed to be unlimited. Developing for multiple clouds is tricky, because a great deal depends on the app. The next generation of apps will be simple but multi-platform and will use “tons of data,” and Cloud Foundry includes functions to support scaling data. Then it becomes easier to deploy an app on one cloud and redeploy it to another.

And the value of this vision is demonstrated by the uptake of Cloud Foundry. Since its introduction four months ago, Chen says, its user base has doubled every two months while the number of apps written in it has tripled every three months. So the apps are outrunning the number of users, which shows that they like the platform and come back to use it over again on more than one project.