News

Tools emerge from JavaOne platform

• By Michael W. Bucken, John K. Waters
• June 16, 2003

Enterprise and mobile application development tools took center stage at last week's JavaOne conference as Sun and several other vendors unveiled a variety of offerings aimed at continuing the corporate spread of Java.

Sun formally unveiled what it calls Project Rave, a toolset aimed directly at Microsoft Visual Basic and Visual Studio developers, Sun vice president of developer platforms Rich Green told e-ADT. "This is targeted at a specific demographic -- a huge demographic," he said in describing the Microsoft development community. "We think these developers want an opportunity to develop in Java."

Meanwhile, Openwave Systems brought out the 1.5 version of its Mobile SDK (formerly known as Openwave Mobile Developer Toolkit). The new implementation can be integrated with the popular Borland JBuilder IDE, said Gina Centoni, VP of developer marketing and former Sun Java evangelist.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) also took the wraps off a new tool for developers using the Eclipse open-source framework. HP billed its new OpenView Internet Usage Manager (IUM) Component Development Environment as a tool that "reduces the complexity of software development for multiple environments and makes it easier to build standards-based applications."

Washington, D.C.-based SolarMetric -- founded by M.I.T. alumni to create enterprise development products that use Java -- introduced Kodo JDO, which is designed to provide access to relational and legacy databases through the JDO specification. This enables Java developers to use database technology from Java without being experts in SQL or other database specific infrastructure languages. SolarMetric is one of the primary evangelists of Sun's Java Data Objects (JDO) standard, a generic spec for object persistence that is data store-agnostic, so application portability across relational databases and back-end data stores is trivial. Initial efforts to implement JDO have focused mainly on relational databases. Through an alliance with the Exigen Group, SolarMetric intends to make the "ideals and vision" of the JDO standard a reality.

Enterprise integration middleware vendor Fiorano Software brought out the latest version of its JMS Server at this year's show. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company billed FioranoMQ 7.0 as the industry's only Java Messaging Server with true High-Availability (HA). Enhancements to Version 7.0 include support for HA and distributed transactions, as well as enhancements to administration and management tools.

M7 Corp., Cupertino, Calif., introduced a new JumpStart Program for Rapid J2EE development that company officials said is aimed at corporate developers and ISVs who want to develop sophisticated enterprise Web applications using a standard J2EE architecture, but do not want to deal with the low-level programming and complexity normally associated with J2EE. The JumpStart program includes software, consulting and training for developers using the M7 Application Assembly Suite.

Embarcadero Technologies debuted Describe Enterprise 6.0 for SunONE Studio 5, Standard Edition. The integration of Describe 6.0 and SunONE Studio 5 addresses the need to manage complex application source code and to reuse that code across the enterprise. Using Describe 6.0 and SunONE Studio 5 in concert reduces the complexity and effort of documenting source code head-on by providing progressive and seamless embedded integration of UML modeling directly within the developers' IDE.