Sun Debuts Java Studio Enterprise 8 In Shadow of Eclipse

Source: CRN

Summary:
Sun's Java programming language continues to grow in use but the company's development tools and middleware platform is getting eclipsed by a key open source rival, partners say.

As Microsoft unveiled its long awaited Visual Studio 2005 earlier this week, Sun announced a significant upgrade of its Java Studio Enterprise at JavaOne Tokyo on Wednesday.

Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8, built on the company's NetBeans 4.1 IDE, offers numerous benefits including enhanced Unified Modeling Language (UML) support, real-time collaboration, new mobile and wireless features, integrated load testing and support for Solaris 10. It is available free to all registered developers on the Sun Developer Network.

NetBeans 4.1 was announced last May. To date, Sun claims more than 4.5 million copies of the open source IDE have been downloaded since the Sun-sponsored open source project debuted in 2000.

Still, several Sun partners are moving to Eclipse development platform. They are also betting that open source middleware stacks such as JBoss will crush Sun's commercial and open source implementations of the Java Enterprise System.

"There's no Java Studio, everything is Eclipse now. We have moved exclusively to Eclipse. We have moved to Apache/JBoss/Tomcat for infrastructure software as a service offerings," said Doug Nassaur, president of True North Technologies, a former Sun partner in Alpharetta, Ga. "We have also moved off messaging and file sharing to open source alternatives and are evaluating a database move as well."

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