Borland set to join Java tools group

SAN FRANCISCO -- The JavaOne conference here will offer a virtual “Who’s Who” in the industry, making a variety of announcements boosting the Java programming language, including BEA, Borland, and IBM.

The show will feature Borland Software joining the JTC (Java Tools Community) as well as moves by Compuware and BEA to accommodate the Eclipse open source tools effort.

IBM will tout new developer resources for building SOAs (service-oriented architectures). Several third parties, meanwhile, will participate in a JavaServer Faces component marketplace at java.com.

Borland will formally join the JTC as a core member, according to Pat Kerpan, Borland CTO. The JTC was formed in January by Sun Microsystems, BEA Systems, and others to provide for interoperability of Java tools.

In participating, Borland is seeking interoperability in design and deploy times for Java tools, Kerpan said.

Actually, Borland had pondered joining at the initial formation of the organization, but at the time had some questions about the JTC’s relationship to the Java Community Process (JCP), the formal procedure for proposing amendments to Java. Borland was concerned that the tools organization might compete with JCP. “From our viewpoint, the relationship to the JCP was unclear, at least in our minds,” Kerpan said. Now, it is clear the two programs are not competitive to each other, he said.

Compuware, meanwhile, will unveil its OptimalJ 3.2 tool for analysis, design, and testing. Featured in Version 3.2 is a plug-in to integrate OptimalJ with the Eclipse IDE. Additionally, Unified Modeling Language (UML) models are being added for sequence and state diagrams, for modeling the flow of an application, and expressing changes in a particular occurrence of data, respectively.

The Developer Edition also will ship with the JetBrains IntelliJ IDE. “We saw a big market acceptance of IntelliJ as far as [being] a fully functional IDE,” said Mike Sawicki, Compuware OptimalJ product manager. Compuware, a member of the Eclipse organization, traditionally has relied on the NetBeans IDE but is expanding to include Eclipse and IntelliJ.

Also featured in Version 3.2 are behavior modeling capabilities for applications and model-merge functions to ease collaboration. OptimalJ ships on July 13, with licenses costing from $1,900 per named user for the Developer Edition Powered by IntelliJ, to $5,000 per user for the Professional Edition, and $10,000 per user for the Architecture Edition.

BEA also is cozying up to Eclipse, despite not being a member company and having no plans to join. BEA along with Eclipse and Instantiations plan to unveil “Pollinate,” an open source incubator project to build an Eclipse-based development environment and toolset to integrate with Apache Beehive. The Beehive effort is an open source application framework based on BEA’s WebLogic Workshop.

Instantiations will build a set of Eclipse plug-ins to bolt onto Beehive, according to BEA. Eclipse developers can take advantage of BEA’s control technology, which provides a lightweight, server-side component model to allow applications to connect to databases, Web services, and Java Message Service message queues, said Dave Cotter, director of developer marketing at BEA.

Don’t look for BEA to join Eclipse, however. “BEA is just not ready to join Eclipse. There appears to be no point at this stage,” Cotter said.  BEA’s WebLogic Workshop serves as a rival to Eclipse.