VMware has released the free beta of VMware Micro Cloud Foundry, a complete version of the virtualization company’s open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that can run locally on a developer’s Mac or PC. That means cloud ISVs can focus on building applications locally, instead of worrying about middleware or where to deploy.

Cloud Foundry is hyped heavily by VMware as being open and platform-agnostic. VMware Micro Cloud Foundry fits into that vision by letting developers do what they do best, and deploy their application to whatever public or private cloud they choose after it’s developed.

“Because Micro Cloud Foundry runs in a local virtual machine, developers can easily create and experiment with cutting-edge applications on their own computers, a model consistent with traditional development processes, but lacking from current PaaS models,” VMware said in its press release.

Obviously, you’ll need a VMware-provided hypervisor such as VMware Fusion (Mac OS X) or VMware Player (a free download for PC) to take advantage of Micro Cloud Foundry.

Currently, Micro Cloud Foundry supports the following application frameworks, with the promise of more to come in regular updates:

Any application developed on Micro Cloud Foundry can be deployed to the full version of VMware’s PaaS, wherever it may be hosted. This is the third part of VMware’s Cloud Foundry strategy: the first two, launched back in April, were the VMware-hosted version and the CloudFoundry.org open source release.

The fourth element of Cloud Foundry, designed for cloud service providers and enterprises, is still forthcoming.