News

MyEclipse Blue + Spring = Bling IDE

• By John K. Waters
• July 13, 2011

Genuitec, creator of the MyEclipse Java EE integrated development environment (IDE), and Spring dev tools maker Skyway Software today released a new IDE aimed at IBM shops adopting Spring in their WebSphere-deployable applications.

Dubbed MyEclipse Bling, the new IDE combines the WebSphere tooling found in the MyEclipse Blue Edition with Skyway's advanced bootstrapping and auto code generation.

The MyEclipse Blue IDE is customized for IBM's WebSphere application server. Genuitec bills it as alternative to Big Blue's own Rational tooling. Spring is the most popular Java framework on the market with the highest adoption rate among developers, according to several industry surveys.

A spokesperson for Genuitec told ADTmag that the development of Bling was driven "solely our IBM customers," adding, "IBM Rational just doesn't do a good job on Spring support when deployed to WebSphere, but our tools do a good job with enhancements on top of the SpringSource/VMware offerings, such as the Spring code auto generation and building apps for cloud, mobile, and desktop environments simultaneously while deploying to WebSphere."

Genuitec's Vice President of Technology Todd Williams called the announcement "a revolutionary product launch" for his company.

The Bling IDE integrates with WebSphere to allow developers to use Spring code generation tools to create many project types simultaneously. It's designed to allow them to scaffold and bootstrap projects for iPhone, Adobe Flex, Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, and JSF 2.0, among others. They can even prepare projects for Google's App Engine, the company says. Bling supports Java EE 6, HTML 5, Windows and Linux, ICEFaces 2, JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, and control of EJB and EAR deployments. It comes with Java editors, HTML editors, Inspectors, Maven, Hibernate, ALM dashboards and project team synchronization capabilities.

Texas-based Genuitec's MyEclipse is both a Java EE IDE and a Web development tool suite for the Eclipse platform. The company promotes the tool for developers using UML, JSP, XML, Struts, JSF and EJBs. It supports Ajax, Web Services development, Java Persistence, extended database support, and application server integration, the company says. Genuitec is a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation.

Tampa, Florida-based Skyway Software is a provider of an open-source code generation tool and scaffolding for Spring-based Web application development. The company's Skyway Builder is an Eclipse-based code generation tool for Spring apps. Skyway also provides a model-centric development and deployment environment called Visual Perspectives, which focuses on Web services and RIAs for Spring and Spring MVC.

The two companies collaborated last year to create the MyEclipse for Spring STS Edition plug-in for the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). When the collaboration was announced, Skyway president Sean Walsh described the two companies' technologies as particularly complementary.

"We serve the same software developer market but offer different products that complement each other extremely well," Walsh said at the time. "Now that Skyway Builder runs seamlessly inside of MyEclipse, we have the reach to bring our powerful Spring development accelerators into the hands of millions of Java and Spring developers."

Bling is available now via a subscription model. More information is available on the Genuitec Web site here.