Kev's Development Toolbox

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.

Macromedia have been working on enhancements to their Flash technology to make it more widely available to Java developers.

Rather than develop Flash enabled sites with Macromedia’s design tools, Macromedia Flex will enable Java developers to create and control Flash front-end content from a J2EE application server.

The Flex server software is expected to ship 2004.

Various news items and blogs this week have commented on the fact that Sun may be considering joining the Eclipse group in order to either have a say in the development of the project, or gain usage of the project for their own tools.

As Sun’s main platform for Java development is currently based on the NetBeans Open Source project, there is some speculation that Sun possibly has more of an interest in adopting Eclipse instead.

Eclipse, backed by IBM, currently has wide support for plug-ins and add-ons, and this is possibly what Sun is looking for to enhance their own IDE offerings.

The interesting point that is causing a lot of speculation is the SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit) implementation in Eclipse that is used as a replacement to AWT and Swing – this is implemented using platform native code for efficiency, and so goes against Sun’s goals of ‘write once, run anywhere’.