Per the site manifest:

This is our place to share cool tools created by VMware engineers.  There is a wide range of tools here for you, including one for automating tasks, getting ESX performance graphs, a rich Internet application framework and much more. These tools are offered under Technical Preview or relevant Open Source License.

They are calling each app/tool/API a fling.   This is a pretty smart naming.   I have seen several start up companies employees start making some cool code that never gets to see the light of day.   They are just flings of interest to help a specific problem.   They don’t always become full fledged products.

Here’s the current list:

Apache Pivot

Like most modern development platforms, Pivot provides a comprehensive set of foundation classes that together comprise a “framework”. These classes form the building blocks upon which more complex and sophisticated applications can be built.

Dynamo RIO

DynamoRIO exports an interface for building dynamic tools for a wide variety of uses: program analysis and understanding, profiling, instrumentation, optimization, translation, etc. Unlike many dynamic tool systems, DynamoRIO is not limited to insertion of callouts/trampolines and allows arbitrary modifications to application instructions via a powerful IA-32/AMD64 instruction manipulation library. DynamoRIO provides efficient, transparent, and comprehensive manipulation of unmoOndified applications running on stock operating systems (Windows or Linux) and commodity IA-32 and AMD64.

esxplot

Esxplot is a GUI based tool that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program loads files of this data and presents it as a hierarchical tree where the values are selectable in the left panel of the tool, graphs of the selected metrics are plotted in the right panel.

Onyx

Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between the vSphere Client and the vCenter Server. It monitors the network communication between them and translates it into an executable PowerShell code. Later this code could be modified and saved into a reusable function or script.

SVGA Sonar

VGA Sonar is a demo application for SVGADevTap. SVGADevTap is a user-level library that communicates with the VMware SVGA guest driver to provide low-latency notifications of changes to the screen.

vApprun

The vApprun tool implements the same vApp/OVF feature set as the vSphere 4 release. Thus, Workstation/Fusion can be used as a development environment for advanced OVF packages, and it can be used to evaluate and test OVF packages on your desktops and laptops.

vCMA

VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA) – vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices.

VGC

VMware Guest Console allows you to manage the Guest OSes from the VMware layer.

VI Java

vSphere Java API is a set of Java libraries that sits on top of existing vSphere SDK Web Services interfaces. It provides full managed object model and run-time type checking, resulting dramatic productivity boost. With the new Web Services engine in 2.0, it also performs much faster than engines like Apache AXIS up to 15 times.

Virtual USB Analyzer

The Virtual USB Analyzer is a free and open source tool for visualizing logs of USB packets, from hardware or software USB sniffer tools. As far as we know, it’s the world’s first tool to provide a graphical visualization along with raw hex dumps and high-level protocol analysis.

If you want to see what is possible with a companies products, these are some of the tools to go look at.  http://labs.vmware.com