Sun still pondering Eclipse participation

Despite recently rejecting an invitation to participate in the IBM-led Eclipse open source Java tools initiative, Sun Microsystems may still join the organization, Sun officials said on Wednesday.

The company, during a press presentation at Sun offices in San Francisco, also presented a road map for the NetBeans open source tools program, which is often seen as a competitor to Eclipse.

"Our involvement with Eclipse, should it happen, would really be around tools standardization," said James Gosling, Sun CTO in the company's Java tools and development group.

"Exactly what form it would take, who knows? But it certainly would not be [to] throw away NetBeans and join Eclipse," Gosling added. Discussions are still being held pertaining to participating in Eclipse, a Sun representative said.

Saying it was not offered "an equitable share in mutual development," Sun dropped out of negotiations to join Eclipse, according to a Sun statement released in early-December. The company had hoped to merge the NetBeans and Eclipse initiatives, both of which feature open source IDEs.

An IBM official in an e-mail response to questions Wednesday said the company would welcome Sun to Eclipse.

"We welcome Sun or any other vendor, for that fact, who is committed to providing customers with the most open development platform to join," said Michael Loughran, a representative for autonomic computing and technology development in the IBM Software Group.

Featured during Sun's NetBeans presentation were vendors such as Compuware and telecommunications services vendor OpenWave Systems, stressing how they benefit from using NetBeans.

"The sum of all, or the bottom line for us, is developers are the lynchpin to our success," said Rick Levenson, director of technology at OpenWave. "NetBeans, both the technology as well as the NetBeans community, really is what enables us at OpenWave to enable the developers."

A road map was presented for NetBeans. Version 3.6 of the NetBeans IDE, due in late-March, is to feature a look and feel that will make NetBeans look native on platforms such as Windows, said Steve Wilson, NetBeans engineering director.

The redesigned UI also will improve workflow between functions such as code editing, debugging, and GUI-building.

Support for Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4 is being added in Version 3.6, specifically support for the latest versions of Java Server Pages (JSP) and Servlets. JSP editing and debugging will be highlighted as well.

Also featured in Version 3.6 is code-folding, for displaying different blocks of source code.

NetBeans 4.0, due in the third quarter of this year, features automated re-factoring, for renaming of methods, fields, and transformations in code. Smart coding in Version 4.0 allows for quick editing. Build and project management also will be featured.

Version 4.0 is to include support for the latest Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition 1.5 variant, known as the "Tiger" release. Tiger features monitoring and management improvements.

Additionally, language features as generics will be supported in code editing in Version 4.0 of NetBeans.

"This [version] represents a major leap in the NetBeans IDE and platform, probably some of the biggest changes since we acquired the [NetBeans] company back in 2000," Wilson said.