Kev's Development Toolbox

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 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.

Sun discussed detailed of its ‘Project Rave’ Java development tools project at a quarterly customer conference this week.

Apparently the current feedback is suggesting that this new tool set, which when released will be called Java Studio Creator, will be rich good enough to entice developers currently using Eclipse based tools back to NetBeans.

This is suggesting that the new development tool may still be based on NetBeans, which may or may not be a good thing.

The Apache website has an interesting build and project management tool/framework called ‘Mavern’ which is fast becoming popular for a number of Open Source projects.

OnJava.com have an introductory article about the framework on their site.

Mavern automates a lot of the project build tasks that are common to most large projects, including: code compilation, creating JavaDoc, running JUnit TestCases, performing code analysis and producing reports (code standard violations etc), and producing reports of version control repository activity and status.