Java IDE Technical Preview

A not-so-Anonymous Coward writes: "During a Sun developer 'chalk talk' Thursday, Joe Keller, Sun vice president of Java Web services, said the company will release a preview of the tool, known as Project Rave, that the Santa Clara, Calif., company introduced at its JavaOne conference in June. Sun has touted Project Rave as a rapid application development tool akin to Microsoft Corp.'s Visual Basic. In fact, Sun had its developers study Visual Basic to a great extent while building the tool, Sun sources said. Sounds like .NET is going to get a run for it's money."

Open Source base kept secret

[bartash]

Rave is based on NetBeans [netbeans.org] technology but they don't mention that in the article.

Re:java is dead

[chochos]

I'm at a Microsoft event for Software Architects right now, and a lot of people that I've been talking to in here (working at companies that are Microsoft partners), have told me that they have many customers that want development in Java. That came as a surprise to me, being my first Microsoft event, I never thought I would hear so much talk about Java from the people here (I've also heard the "L" word, and have even uttered it several times to see people's reaction - yes it's childish, I know, but I'm a little bored).

Microsoft themselves have said in some conferences that they expect their customers to have a lot of different technologies in their infrastructure and that it's rather rare to find an all-Microsoft infrastructure at a company. And when they say non-Microsoft they usually mean Java (they've said a couple of times).

At last...?

[joshsnow]

Could Sun finally have seen the light? Back in 1999, Sun purchased an Enterprise Software company called Forte Software. Forte (not to be confused with the Netbeans rebrand) was an application suite which achieved what J2EE achieves now - but completely painlessly.

All of the plumbing was hidden from developers, leaving them free to concentrate on business logic. Forte shipped with a complete Application Framework and its own language the Transactional Object Oriented Language(TOOL).

Basically (to cut a long story short) Java looked as if it had more potential at the time, so Forte was rebranded to Sun ONE Unified Development Server [sun.com] and allowed to wither. It's officially being end-of-lined by Q1 next year.

The point here is that this Project Rage seems very much like Unified server - but it works in Javaland. It (hopefully) hides all the plumbing of a J2EE application from developers, allowing them to concentrate on business logic. If it's more than Suns version of Eclipse, then it'll certainly be a product to watch. I hope Sun get it right this time and that it's not too late.

Where this leaves IBM and Weblogic remains to be seen - unless this Rage integrates with their app servers. It ought to - seamlessly of course...
:)

Eclipse + MyEclipse

[LauraW]

For J2EE, try Eclipse plus the "MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench [myeclipseide.com]" plugins. They do a pretty good job of integrating lots of other open-source J2EE plugins into something that's easy to maintain. And at $30/year it's hard to beat.

Re:java is dead

[chicogeek]

"It's from first hand experience benchmarking .NET applications I am actively developing. In fact the scalability factor sucks big time."

First of all, perhaps you should analyze how you're misusing the framework. I develop an application that is used by 400+ people at one major US entity, it is 100% .NET on the client and SQL Server on the backend. I have had 0 problems with performance on the backend and this app is not only highly-transactional, but also throws an OLAP front-end into the mix. You're obviously doing something wrong if you can't build a scalable enterprise application using .NET and SQL Server. And quoting Brumme like that...no wonder you posted AC. If someone would like to read the Brumme blog, go here [gotdotnet.com]. It's all very good information.