Tag: java

The Eclipse developers have been busy working on a set of all-singing, all-dancing plugins to help developers use Eclipse to develop J2EE applications, called the Web Tools Project.

The WTP has three subprojects:

• Web Standard Tools (WST): a collection of common plugins to aid development, including XML, XHTML editors and validators.
• Java Standard Tools (JST): plugins to support development and deployment of J2EE applications to J2EE 1.4 servers.
• JavaServerFaces (JSF): editors and support for developing JSF web frontends. Will not initially be available, until the 1.5 release.

The 1.0RC1 version was just recently released for download.

This is great news, but there have been similar plugins out there for a long time now (Lomboz, MyEclipse), that already offer all these features, so it seems the WTP project may have been too late. Also, Java EE 5 is around the corner, and where is the EE 5 support? (at least in early adopter form anyway?)

The developers of OpenSymphony WebWork have announced that they will be merging their project with Struts.

This may be the next best thing for both frameworks, especially since JSF is likely to become the framework of choice once Java EE 5 app servers come out with support for JSF (as JSF is part of the EE 5 spec).

This should be a relatively easy merge of the two projects, especially since the two are both command based implementations of the MVC pattern (compared to other frameworks like Tapestry and JSF which are event based).

Although not a definitive indicator of popularity, it was recently noticed that Java has become the most commonly used language for projects hosted on SourceForge. This knocks C++ to the number 2 position.

JSR 244, the spec for the Java Enterprise Edition 5 has now reached ‘Proposed Final Draft’. At this point the content of this spec is now pretty much set for how Java EE 5.0 will look, and what features it will contain.

Any bets for who will get a Java EE5.0 app server to market first? My bet is on JBoss.