News

Open Source is Serious Business for Exadel Customers

• By John K. Waters
• August 9, 2005

Here's a statistic worthy of a doubletake: According to Exadel, every Fortune 1000 firm has downloaded its tools—at least to kick the tires.

"This says, of course, very good things about our technology," says Fima Katz, the company's founder and CEO, "but I think there is a larger and more important meaning, and that is that these companies are either using or considering open source."

Exadel builds tools that use the Eclipse platform to leverage Struts, JavaServer Faces, Hibernate, Spring and other open-source technologies for business solutions. The company has just announced availability of the latest version of its Web application development suite. Based on Eclipse 3.1, Exadel Studio Pro 3.0 comes with new visual project and component editors, rich project navigation and continuous program verification. By combining visual and source-oriented development approaches with support for multiple open-source technologies, the tool enables developers to work with multiple frameworks all under one roof.

Exadel's customer list doesn't yet include the entire Fortune 1000, but Safeway, McDonald's, AT&T, Bank of America, Gallo Winery, Amtrak, GE Lighting, NextCard and eBay are among the company's "marquee" customers.

"These companies aren't interested in open source because it's free," Katz tells Java Trends. "It's not free, though it is cost effective. The people we talk to want open source because of the innovation is promotes with the development model, and because it frees them from vendor lock-in."

Katz launched Exadel in 1998 with the goal of making corporate software applications more adaptable. Toward that end, the company developed a set of design and deployment engines for creating new software functionality by rapidly repackaging existing software functionality.

Based on those design and deployment engines, Studio Pro comes with features including:

- New Hibernate mapping tools that allow developers to create advanced database mapping for Web applications with little or no knowledge of Hibernate coding:

• Full support for forward, reverse and "meet-at-the-middle" engineering approaches
• Mapping validator with Quick Fix function
• Support for refactoring between Java and Hibernate mapping metadata
• Specialized wizards for all the different aspects of object/relational mapping, including field and class auto-mapping with a unique incremental functionality (Named Queries, Fetch Strategy, Class Cache, DDL generation and Hibernate configuration wizards)

- WYSIWYG JSP page designer, that allows users to radically shorten development:

• Seamless WYSIWYG for Windows and Linux environments
• Wide range of pre-defined JSP tags, Struts tags and JSF components
• Powerful capabilities to customize the "design-time" look for custom-made JSF components and JSP tags
• Full support for drag and drop between project navigator, component palette and Page Designer windows
• In-place component resizing

- Enhanced functionality that simplifies development work:

• Improved “Project Capabilities” wizard with ability to add new capabilities to the project for Struts, JSF RI, MyFaces, Spring and Hibernate
• Full Code Assist for JSP, XML and TLD files along with special Code Assist for JSF expression language; uses common project database that collects data about all project artifacts
• Verification Framework for XML, JSP and Java code, JSF and Struts configuration files and advanced JSP syntax rules
• Code generation and refactoring support for JSF Managed Beans and JSF configuration files

For more information about Exadel Studio Pro 3.0, go to: Exadel.