Category: Kev’s Blog

Hibernate 2.1 final was released yesterday – downloads are here:

Sourceforge

There is a interesting post on java.net in Brabant’s blog this week giving his feedback from a demo of the upcoming Project Rave tool.

Brabant comments on some of the features demoed, including:

• the visual JSP/JSF page builder
• visual UI element to database binding
• an updated UI for the tool, which is supposedly still based on NetBeans, but is still a Swing application.

Apparently the audience was surprised to hear that the IDE was still based on NetBeans and Swing as it looked pretty good. There was some surprise to hear that Eclipse was not being used (as announced this week). Sounds like there are some Swing UI enhancements coming along soon as well…

Sun announced this week further details on its goal to provide easier to use Java development tools

The new upcoming development tools will be based on a new version of NetBeans (4.0) which will include a ‘radical overhaul’ of its user interface.

Other support will include integrated support for Web Service and Web Application development.

The new tools will also include various code refactoring tools to help with the development of large projects.

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.