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.
With the newly shipping Sun Java Studio Creator tool being based on JavaServer Faces component technology, Sun Microsystems at JavaOne will unveil a JavaServer Faces Component Catalog at java.com. These components will provide developers with access to compatible third-party components to shorten project cycles, according to Sun. Companies now participating include Ilog, Otrix, and Software FX. Companies planning to participate in the future include Esri and Quest Software. Components to be offered provide specialized functionality such as charting and GIS infrastructure.
IBM will expand its “on demand” resources for developers by making available educational resources on SOAs. The materials be available on the Web services “Zone” of the IBM developerWorks site at www.ibm.com/developerWorks.
Additionally, IBM is announcing that developers building on standards-based platforms who visit the Web site now can get additional 10 percent discounts on hardware as well as access to the IBM Career Index for job-searching. Discounts also are available on books.
Borland at JavaOne also will tout its upcoming Optimizeit ServerTrace 3 tool, providing performance optimization and management for the J2EE platform and SOAs. Shipping in August, the software serves as the performance testing component of Borland’s ALM (application lifecycle management) portfolio and features integration with the StarTeam management element of the ALM platform. This integration provides for problem-tracking.
New in Version 3 is the ability to pinpoint performance bottlenecks quickly during pre-deployment testing, in the Test Edition of the product. It can be integrated with third-party test tools such as Mercury LoadRunner and Segue SilkPerformer.
Version 3 tracks Web service application calls in SOAs, to optimize response times and maintain application availability, according to Borland. A hibernate mode featured in the Production Edition of ServerTrace 3 captures performance diagnostics at the precise moment when an application problem occurs.
Also at JavaOne:
* Nokia will include support for Eclipse in the Nokia Developer’s Suite for J2ME, Version 2.2, and the Nokia Mobile Server Services SDK. In addition, users can integrate any MIDP (Mobile Information Device Profile) Nokia platform SDK into the Eclipse environment, Nokia said.
* JetBrains will introduce both IntelliJ Idea 4.5, an upgrade of the company’s Java IDE featuring enhanced code inspection, and JetBrains Fabrique, a RAD (rapid application development) environment intended to speed development of J2EE applications through tools, libraries and reusable components. The Visual Fabrique IDE is featured within JetBrains Fabrique.
* Parasoft will debut Jtest 5.1, a unit testing and coding standards analysis product that runs JUnit tests. Improvements help teams correct coding problems. The reporting feature has been redesigned to make it faster and easier to assess project status, according to the company.
* Ilog will unveil the Ilog JViews 6.0 product family, for rapid development of rich clients that enhance collaboration, the company said. Featured is support for business process management developers. The tools within the suite, such as JViews Diagrammer and JViews Charts, are packaged as standalone products for the first time.