VMware’s Cloud Foundry platform will soon be able to add Perl and Python to its list of supported environments after ActiveState late last week announced a closed beta program to test those languages out in Cloud Foundry. These two language platforms come with in-cloud debugging support, as well as a stack that offers both a public and private cloud environment for running existing Perl and Python applications.

Called Stackato, this platform inside Cloud Foundry is expected to be available later this year. A public beta will precede the actual release, said Jeff Hobbs, director of engineering at ActiveState.

“We’re keeping it as a restricted developer preview to manage the bug tracking overload,” he said, explaining the planned release process.

“We made the public sign-up announcement, and we’ll be filtering people in slowly. We’ve been working with internal customers and the early guys, and we’re ironing out some of the features. We’re still in polish mode on it, in much the same way Cloud Foundry is fixing some of the features we’re keeping track of.”

Hobbs said that ActiveState’s IDE, Komodo, will also be modified to support Stackato for debugging . While cloud-focused features for deployment and debugging aren’t yet a standard part of Komodo, they soon will be, he said.

Cloud Foundry developers wishing to use Perl and Python with Stackato will simply use the standard version of Komodo, which will be able to perform one-click deployments to cloud operating systems, and to help developers track down the root cause of problems via new debugging capabilities.

The future of Stackato could include other dynamic languages, said Hobbs. “We’ll be following the advancements in Cloud Foundry. A lot of VMware partners have been interested in creating various extensions. We’re looking at various parts of the Foundry we want to enrich. We’d like to provide more scalability to the dynamic languages and possibly look at supporting PHP as well in the future. We’d also like to add in network monitoring and scalability.”

Pricing for Stackato has not yet been determined.