Sun to Rave about ease of use at JavaOne

Sun Microsystems next week will unveil a developer tool and community portal designed to broaden the appeal of its Java programming language.

The new developer tool, code-named Project Rave, will be demonstrated at Sun's JavaOne Conference in San Francisco next week. It will incorporate the JavaServer Faces Web APIs as well as a number of Java Web services and database connectivity technologies, all with the aim of making Java development -- and in particular, Java Web services development -- easier to do.

Sun will also go live next week with a new open source developer portal called Java.net. The site will host open source implementations of a number of Java APIs, including the Java API for XML-Based Remote Procedure Calls (JAX-RPC), the JAIN telecommunication APIs, Sun's Jini and Jxta networking software, and parts of Sun's Swing graphical user interface libraries. Java.net will also host Sun's NetBeans development tools, which will form the basis for Project Rave, Sun said.

Project Rave and Java.net are designed, in part, to attract a new class of developer to the Java platform, said Sun Vice President of Developer Platforms Rich Green. "It is designed to be a very rapid graphical development environment for constructing two-tier applications," he said.

While Green said Sun clearly had Microsoft's Visual Studio developers in mind as it developed Project Rave, "we're not solely targeting those folks," he explained.

"We are now poised, from a platform and a technology tools level, to attract two to three times the number of developers who have associated with the platform to date," Green said. "We would expect to grow from 3 million to 10 million [developers] over the next two to three years," he added.

Although Sun is aiming Project Rave partly at Visual Studio developers, the move may come too late to convert many in the Microsoft camp, said Meta Group Senior Program Director Thomas Murphy. "Now that .Net's been out for a year, what chance do you have of converting people?" he asked. "Getting the developers to switch is going to be very hard," he said.

Sun has not yet determined pricing for Project Rave or whether or not it will be open-sourced, but Green said the product will ship in beta version this fall.

Meta Group's Murphy expects the finished version of Project Rave to ship in 2004. "To me, that's really late," he said. "By the time they get out with that, Microsoft will be close to shipping the next release of Visual Studio," he added.

Some developers agree that, despite the fact that Java has been around longer, the similarities between the two platforms are diminishing. "We're getting pretty heavily into C#," said Timothy Brown, a systems architect and Java developer with Airnet Systems Inc. "C# and Java development are getting pretty close to equal footing," he said.

Java will also get a new logo, with simpler, less wispy lines than its familiar coffee cup design. Apparently, Java's original logo simply did not scale as well as the programming language itself.

"We needed something that could really be shown across many different devices," said Ingrid Van Den Hoogen, senior director of Java and strategic marketing. "It's been difficult for the handset manufacturers to actually put it on a screen the size of a cell phone. ... It was a scaling issue."