Month: November 2003

Several major Java tools vendors, including Oracle and Sun, are forming a standards group in order to promote interoperability between different toolsets, and in particular, IDEs.

The move is seen as one attempt to promote and construct IDEs that are comparable in functionality to Microsoft’s VisualStudio.NET – last year at JavaOne Sun made several statements refering to the need to reduce development complexity in the Java API arena, and produce quality tool sets.

This group may be looking at the ability to build a common add-on framework so that most IDEs can share add-ons and plug-ins.

Following the surprising news that Sun will be giving away the next version of SunONE Application Server as the Reference Implementation of J2EE 1.4, apparently they are also considering Open Sourcing the product source code.

In a long running dispute over the cost of certifying the JBoss Application Server with Sun to say it is J2EE compliant, The JBoss Group and Sun have come to an arrangement where JBoss will be officially be J2EE 1.4 compliant.

Sun have recently relaxed their J2EE product certification procedures in order to accommodate Open Source products. Previously the cost of J2EE product certification was related to the income and sales of a J2EE product. Before this latest agreement, The JBoss Group were arguing that the cost of certification for the JBoss server should be free, as the product is given away for free. Sun were reluctant to give away the certification ‘badge’ of approval for free since the majority of other J2EE Application Server vendors had previous paid large licensing fees to Sun, in relation to sales of their products.

At the ApacheCon conference this week, Apache has announced that OpenEJB, the EJB container that is to be part of the Geronimo J2EE implementation from Apache, is to be certified by Sun under the TCK license from Sun. This means the Geromimo will be a Sun certified J2EE 1.4 server platform.