News

New MyEclipse IDE for Spring Developers

• By John K. Waters
• January 13, 2010

A new version of the MyEclipse Java IDE aimed specifically at developers using the Spring Framework is being developed jointly by MyEclipse creator Genuitec and Spring development tools maker Skyway Software, the two companies disclosed Tuesday.

The jointly developed IDE, called MyEclipse for Spring, will combine scaffolding, project bootstrapping and enhanced development editors designed to allow new Spring developers to take on advanced projects, explained Todd Williams, Genuitec's vice president of technology.

"MyEclipse has always been targeted to enterprise Java," Williams said. "And Spring has really come on strong over the last few years, either added to enterprise Java or as an alternative to it throughout the entire stack. So we thought it was the right time to introduce a product targeted at Spring."

Flower Mound, Texas-based Genuitec bills MyEclipse as both a comprehensive 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, Fla.-based Skyway 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.

Essentially, MyEclipse for Spring will be able to run the Skyway Builder tool within the development environment, allowing development teams to quickly build an application "scaffold." Scaffolding is a method of generating large portions of the application using best practices, Williams explained.

"Historically, the guy who knew Spring really well had to step out and actually and write all the application tiers to get something going before anyone else could come onto a project," Williams explained. "With these scaffolding-generation capabilities, you'll be able to, say, point it to a set of database tables that you want to build the application off of, and 'scaffold' sort of a skeleton application through all the tiers. 

The new MyEclipse for Spring IDE will also come with a Spring Web editor, handlers for JSF and Struts, and Genuitec's UML tools.

Skyway President Sean Walsh sees the two companies' technologies as particularly complementary.

"We serve the same software developer market but offer different products that complement each other extremely well," he said in a statement. "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."

Spring is a layered Java/J2EE framework based on code published in the book Expert One-on-One Java EE Design and Development by SpringSource co-founder Rod Johnson. He also wrote the first version of the framework and now serves as general manager of the SpringSource division of VMware.

The two companies expect to release the first version of MyEclipse for Spring shortly before the annual EclipseCon conference in March. Look for an early access version later this month.