Tools wrap: Sun, Javalobby, Infravio make moves

Officials at Sun Microsystems, Javalobby, and Infravio this week revealed initiatives positioned as advances in either Java development or Web services consumption.

The Sun Microsystems-led NetBeans open source tools project made available an early version of a profiler tool for troubleshooting, with a Sun official also reaffirming that NetBeans remains Sun’s open source platform of choice. The company has been subject of speculation that it would participate in the rival Eclipse open source program.

The NetBeans Profiler is an integrated CPU and memory profiler offered as a free add-on to the NetBeans 3.6 IDE. It detects issues such as performance problems and memory leaks.

“What this allows you to do is in the same IDE that you’re developing your application, there’s a number of functions you can perform to troubleshoot the performance of your application,” said Larry Baron, senior product manager for NetBeans at Sun.

The early release, intended for user testing, will be followed up with a beta upgrade when NetBeans 4.0 is released in December. The production version of Profiler is due with NetBeans 4.1 in early 2005. Version 4.1 will focus on adding Java development capabilities such as Enterprise JavaBeans.

Despite overtures during recent months that Sun might join the rival Eclipse tools initiative, the status quo remains, according to Baron. “Right now there are no plans [to join Eclipse]. It’s difficult for me to comment on the future. The future has to play itself out,” Baron said.

Meanwhile, Javalobby this week unveiled JDocs, which is a centralized database of Java documentation for general consumption by developers at large, found at http://www.jdocs.com. Javalobby is an online community of Java developers, at http://www.javalobby.org, with more than 150,000 members.

Java APIs and libraries are available such as Java 2 Standard Edition, Eclipse, Hibernate, Java Server Pages, and Apache Jakarta, said Rick Ross, president of Javalobby.org. There were 50 APIs on the site by this afternoon and Ross expects close to 100 to be available by Monday.

“We’re willing to host all APIs so that every developer has a one-stop shop,” Ross said. The site also includes functions for asking and answering questions, he said.

“We think that it will help increase developer productivity and help people solve problems, help people share their insights,” said Ross.

Also in the development tools arena, Infravio in September plans to release an upgrade to its X-registry directory software for registering of Web services, adding conformance testing features to make sure Web services are being used properly, said Jeff Tonkel, CEO and president of Infravio.

Additionally, the upcoming 4.5.2 release of X-registry boosts its governance function, which provides a process model for requesting, authorizing, and authenticating use of Web services. Improvements will be made to process flows and security, Tonkel said.

 X-registry is based on the UDDI standard for Web services directories and provides a way to catalog services where consumers can shop and request use of services. Authorization also is featured.

“X-registry is more like a marketplace for finding and using Web services,” Tonkel said.

Infravio still views the Web services market as being in its early stages.

“The Web services industry is still in its early days and there’s a lot of interest in service-oriented architectures and a lot of interest in Web services as a fundamental part of creating an SOA, and people are doing their early projects,” Tonkel said.

“We’re hoping that in a couple years, this stuff really is going to be rolling, but [now] it's one project at a time,” he said.