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."
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!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
So I (and everyone else) was more skeptical when c#/.net/clr was announced. MS has the advantage of time -- faster machines, more memory -- and they saw what SUN did wrong.
I won't drink the
As for java, the days are numbered. Many companies are now refusing to touch java since MS JVM will be unsupported (I argued with our R/D VP for two hours, I showed him the Sun, IBM, and Blockdown JVM... it didn't matter). Our
Java is resigned to a niche market of server backends. C# might fare better for GUI apps, but not until LongHorn (by which time CPU speed will run it better).
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I love java, but I'm sick of compiling
This shit looks nice.
Rave is based on NetBeans technology but they don't mention that in the article.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
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.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
See the subject. Seriously, what does Project Rave give me that standard J2EE technologies don't already?
.NET?
Or are they talking a new IDE? Something to compete with Visual Studio
If so, I hope it's not based on NetBeans...
*shudder*
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
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 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...
:)
I don't get it. What does this one have that JBuilder 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...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Congradulations. You've succeeded.
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 used it due to the price. I tried out NetBeans some time ago (2-3 years ago?) and wasn't fond of it, though I haven't been back to re-evaluate it.
One thing -- if you ever need to get into building Java GUIs, JBuilder still has the best RAD GUI designer that I've seen, in terms of generating sensible code that you can tweak by hand (within limits), and then use the designer again. GridBagLayout code was never intended to be hand-written! I don't spend much time with Java GUIs anymore, but when I need to I always do the initial cut in JBuilder (the Personal version is free).
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
For J2EE, try Eclipse plus the "MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench" 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.
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 repository corruptions and a few integration issues, but these were easily surmountable in the first instance by making regular backups and usuing a versions of FTEXEC which were known not to have showstopping bugs and in the second by simple management.
Not sure what your performance issues were, but we quickly discovered that in order to make the app scale to the 200+ desktops it was to run on, we had to implement a seemingly convoluted design pattern using DataFactories, Data Access Controllers and a mechanism for managing the database connections and minimising network traffic.
We also had to provide object level transaction management - easily impemented using inheiritance and interfaces.
From what I remember, if the application wasn't designed to be efficient, then you would see problems if you tried to scale it beyond 5 - 10 machines.
From a language standpoint, the "plumbing" was indeed hidden from you. It was absurdly easy to talk to objects cross process or cross machines
Exactly. This is the lesson I'm hoping Sun has learned with this Rave product. Unfourtanately, currently, to produce really efficient J2EE apps requires knowledge of how the EJBs etc work.
BTW, it's nice to meet someone on slashdot who knows that Forte isn't Netbeans!
I think we're heading to a world where all kernel-space code (on your favorite kernel) is C/C++, and all user-space code is, as you put it, managed code: VM, .NET, or others (e.g., a good open source Smalltalk VM.
Hate to give Microsoft credit, but if they succeed in delivering the vision of Longhorn they recently articulated, then Microsoft may push the industry into this model.
> Give me "Project Squaredance" or "Project Hoedown"
> any day!
Doesn't this conjure up an image of a bunch of hyperactive code cowboys furiously coding at the keyboard and changing seats every few minutes?
No thanks. Code cowboys can really mess up a team, and hyperactive hypercaffienated programmers can drive you *CRAZY* changing arguing and changing subjects every few seconds before you have time to respond.
No thanks. Give me a nice boring "Project Rhumba" or "Project Salsa" or even "Project Disco" any day!
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 carcass.
Fortunately I had a Java teacher that made it a point to show us how non-impossible GUI programming can be. But in almost every other langauge I was taught, it was all CLI based examples. You may have seen one example of a windows app, but the subject was kept out of scope.But when you start looking at VB, right away you are making things that are more like real programs than "hello world" examples. It seems to me that there's no reason that in the world of resuable code that a similar expierence could not be produced using true OOP languages.
I was hopeing for something like that when I picked up MS C++Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's