Tag: tech news

As part of the Java Tools Community initiative announced in the news yesterday, IBM and BEA Systems have announced they have created 3 Java Specification Requests (JSRs) for 3 new technologies which will be developed using the Java Community Process (JCP) and will be implemented on both IBM Websphere as well as BEA Weblogic.

The 3 new specifications are:

• Service Data Objects: will provide a common mechanism to pull data from multiple sources such as XML sources and databases
• Timer for Application Servers, a mechanism for scheduling processing jobs
• Work Manager for Application Servers, for setting up processing tasks in parallel

Industry analysts have commented that the omission of Sun in the group developing these new specifications is significant, and probably signifies the beginning end of Sun’s involvement in the development of new technologies based on Java technology. IBM and BEA are the dominant market players in the Application Server market space, and with this announcement are now together shaping new future technologies on the Java platform.

Several major Java tools vendors, including Oracle and Sun, are forming a standards group in order to promote interoperability between different toolsets, and in particular, IDEs.

The move is seen as one attempt to promote and construct IDEs that are comparable in functionality to Microsoft’s VisualStudio.NET – last year at JavaOne Sun made several statements refering to the need to reduce development complexity in the Java API arena, and produce quality tool sets.

This group may be looking at the ability to build a common add-on framework so that most IDEs can share add-ons and plug-ins.

Following the surprising news that Sun will be giving away the next version of SunONE Application Server as the Reference Implementation of J2EE 1.4, apparently they are also considering Open Sourcing the product source code.

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.