Sun has announced that it has abandoned plans to join the Eclipse open source tools group.
Since announcements at JavaOne 2002, Sun has been concentrating efforts on developing a Microsoft Visual Studio equivalent for Java developers, that will be easy for entry level developers but at the same time still offer functionality for experienced developers – the effort has been referred to as ‘Project Rave’.
Sun’s existing SunOne IDE tools have been based on the NetBeans open source code up until now, and it was thought that Sun may have been considering dropping NetBeans in favor of Eclipse, but it seems that is no longer an option. Sun has also commented that it is looking at building a common API, common to both Eclipse and NetBeans so that IDE add-ons are common to both frameworks.