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Programming Sun Microsystems IT Technology

Java IDE Technical Preview 67

Posted by Cliff from the It's-the-new-rave-mahn dept.
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."
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Java IDE Technical Preview More

Java IDE Technical Preview

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  • Project Rave?!? (Score:4, Funny)

    by El ( 94934 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @05:06PM (#7419843)
    Doesn't this conjure up an image of something developed by people that spend all their free time taking Ecstasy and dancing all night to techno music? Doesn't exactly instill confidence in the product, does it? Give me "Project Squaredance" or "Project Hoedown" any day!

  • Open Source base kept secret (Score:5, Informative)

    by bartash ( 93498 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @05:15PM (#7419948)
    Rave is based on NetBeans [netbeans.org] technology but they don't mention that in the article.
    • Personally I think netbeans is best kept a secret. It's Java's attempt at being emacs for all I can tell. I find myself to be MUCH more productive with Eclipse or IDEA.
    • Rave is based on NetBeans technology but they don't mention that in the article.

      Actually, there's a sidebar titled "Enabling technologies" which lists netbeans as one of the enablers.

      However, the importance of this tool isn't in the netbeans base, it's in the integration of the server side J2EE tech etc.

    • It looks like I'm going to be getting into the Java game very soon (and really looking forward to it - I've been wanting to find an excuse to put the time into it). I haven't looked at Java IDEs since NetBeans way back (just pre J2EE, if I recall). Anyway, I'm looking for an IDE I can love, having been generally skeptical of them. I've used emacs or vim for almost everything.

      What would be ideal is something that plays extra-nice with JBoss and won't get in my way, which is my usual complaint with IDEs.

      • Use whatever you like best and you can pay (Netbeans, Jbuilder, idea, eclipse, vim, emacs, notepad, command line, etc).
        No IDE is the best, they all have their woes.
      • I've been using Eclipse for about a year for some large J2EE projects, and I've been very happy with it. I had been using JBuilder since version 2 (!), and switched over when the price suddenly became an issue (my employer folded). I've really come to depend on the refactoring support, which is why I can never understand the diehards who refuse to use an IDE.... I always use the latest milestone release (they've all been very stable). IDEA is also well-known as a good refactoring IDE, though I haven't u

        • Thanks for the reply. Refactoring is going to be a major issue on the project I'm looking at (cleaning up offshored code ;) ), so knowing that is very helpful. And it's all server-side, so GUIs aren't an issue for me at this point.

          I've been a die-hard non-IDE type for a long time, although I like to keep my options open and revisit the state of IDEs fairly often. It's looking like some features of IDEs (managing project files, for example) are going to be helpful enough on this one that I can move away

          • I used Eclipse at my last job, but now I'm fortunate enough to be using WebSphere Studio Application Developer, which is essentially Eclipse on steroids -- same core technology, but far more features. Anyway, the point wasn't to gloat about WSAD but to support the OP who said that the refactoring support is incredible -- in fact, I really can't imagine working on a large code base without it, now that I've become addicted to its convenience and ease of use. Even something as simple as "rename", no global

      • Eclipse + MyEclipse (Score:3, Informative)

        by LauraW ( 662560 )
        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.

        • Cool, thanks! That does look like an excellent package. The feature list that AC posted as a response is enough to make me take a serious look at it. Particularly "WAR, JAR and EAR import and export", "Archive Based Deployment" and Jboss support. Handy, indeed.

  • What Rave is really (Score:4, Insightful)

    by adamy ( 78406 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @06:03PM (#7420428) Homepage Journal
    Is a drag and drop editor for Java Server Faces.

    THey are doing a Direct To DB binding as well.

    Something like this has been neede for a long while, let's just hope that once something is developed in Rave, it can be integrated with other tools (straight Java code) while allowing the people Using Rave to continue to update as well.

  • At last...? (Score:5, Informative)

    by joshsnow ( 551754 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @06:52PM (#7420838) Journal
    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...
    :)

    • Re:At last...? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TioHoltzman ( 709089 ) on Friday November 07, 2003 @09:30PM (#7421967) Homepage

      You, my friend, have obviously never had the "pleasure" of working with Forte. I had the utterly miserable misfortune to spend a year on an all forte project at a large US Tire company from the very begining to the intial deployment of the software to the users.

      And it sucked beyound belief.

      The "IDE" that forte provided was a piece of shit (and that's putting it mildly). It was quirky to develop in, ungodly slow, resource intensive, brain dead peice of heaping crap.

      Our CS intern that we got on the project quickly renamed the the language to Forte Objected Oriented Langauge (FOOL).

      Deploying to 5, that's right folks, 5 machines was an utter nightmare, and took 3 of us to keep it going.

      On the other hand you could partition the application to run on different machines. Useful of course, when the application actually ran.

      From a language standpoint, the "plumbing" was indeed hidden from you. It was absurdly easy to talk to objects cross process or cross machines.

      The problem was everything else was an amateurish piece of shit that rarely worked the way Forte claimed it did. And we had a consultant working with us to iron out all the problems (at $250 an hour, thank you very much).

      And when we finally got it to run, the app ran SO slowly, that he had to hand massage the generated C++ (TOOL/FOOL doesn't itself get compiled - it generated C++ which was then compiled) and add a whole bunch of custom stuff, of course none of this was explained or documented, it Just Worked (well sort of - by the time I left the project, the users HATED the app so much because it was clunky and slow, that they never really used it - it was faster to calculate the retirement calcs by hand than to deal with the app).

      So, yeah, Forte was a real good platform to base stuff off of.



      Pfft!
      • You, my friend, have obviously never had the "pleasure" of working with Forte.

        I have actually - two years worth back in 1997 through 1999 for a CRM company in the UK.

        I agree that by mordern standards the IDE is dated - but I disagree strongly about everything apart from app partitioning being an "amateurish piece of shit". In fact, in my experience, I'd have to say the exact opposite. The whole thing was so tightly integrated that everything just worked.

        Ok, so we ran into some problems with reposit
  • I don't get it. What does this one have that JBuilder [borland.com] hasn't had for about five years? Or am I missing something?
  • Is this to be under a GPL type of license ( or that sun community license thingy ) or will it be 100% commercial and priced out of reach of us amateurs?

    They opened Netbeans when they bought it.. Speaking of which, i suppose this means the death of sun contributed items to NB.

    Id like to see something like this for Python personally as current python IDE's are dismal.... But at least java is platform independent so its still potentially cool...
    • I doubt it will be free. But hopefully they do not make it $1000/seat, and relegate the tool to the dustpin. If they charge around $100-$150, and the tool works I can see it becoming very popular.

  • umm, except not (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Friday November 07, 2003 @09:13PM (#7421898) Homepage
    This doesn't look like it'll be replacing .NET or VB anytime soon. It looks like an IDE for JSP-based sites, not something that will replace VB as a quick-n-dirty IDE for end-user apps nor will it be anything like .NET, which goes far beyond one language and one way of doing things, as Java+Sun provide.

    But then again, it's not out, I've not used it, so I can't say that for sure. It looks like an equivalent to an ASP-builder, which can use VBScript.

    Java the language could not simply out-VB VB. The language itself is too complicated in ways that will not be solved by a GUI builder. Java could be used as the platform for a language and IDE akin to VB, but taking Java the language and adding an IDE will not make many VB coders productive without doing all the learning of Java that any other Java coder has gone through.
    • Yes, it looks like it is tailored to building web applications and web services. Though with the current direction of the industry, I think more and more applications are being pushed to the web, instead of being fat-client/server applicatons. At least the smaller type projects that this tool is targetting.

      I also agree that Java is a more complicated language, and so it will hinder being able to do some things in the GUI builder. However VB.Net has gotten much more complex than VB 6, and so the difference
    • .. for VB coders to make the jump to the OOP way of doing things. VB 6 coders are in a spot where they must choose among new platforms, none of which (even VB.net) is a small learning curve.

      One of the biggest reasons new programmers get hooked on VB is the ease of doing GUIs (while most other languages you are exposed to in school make GUIs look like some kind of spanish inquisition), if you can replicate that expierence in a more robust language, then you'll see VB dropped like a plague ridden swamp rat c

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