In April, San Francisco's Moscone Center played host to Software Development West and JavaOne, Sun's Worldwide Java Developer Conference. The shows were sponsored by two entirely different organizations, yet the result was a '90s technology-centric equivalent of Woodstock. Everywhere you looked, from the grassy park above the Center to the vast show floors and innumerable session rooms below, techies from all corners of the earth and all walks of life engaged in brilliant conversations with perfect strangers. Imagine! The main messages were: Soon you won't even be able to change a tire without using Java, hoarding code is bad, and reusing it via component-based development is good. In Woodstockian terms: Selfishness is out; sharing is in and, dare I say, even groovy.
I'll begin my recap of the shows by discussing the many announcements Sun Microsystems Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.) generated. First on the list is Java Studio, an authoring environment for creating dynamic, interactive Java content for existing Web pages without writing any code. Written entirely in Java, Java Studio lets you create Java applications visually using blocks of reusable JavaBeans components. Java Studio also includes a WYSIWYG HTML editor, which doubles as a browser so you can create or edit your Web page content directly from the Web page environment and see the changes exactly as they will appear.
Sun also announced Java WorkShop 2.0, an upgrade to its multiplatform Java IDE. Version 2.0 will include a built-in, just-in-time compiler in the Java Virtual Machine, a plug-in architecture for third-party support, and profiler tools to help you analyze application performance.
Java WorkShop Professional, which Sun also announced, is an integrated RAD tool that combines the WorkShop 2.0 environment with the Java Studio authoring environment to enable rapid, create-and-play testing of Java applets, applications, and JavaBeans components that comply to the JDK 1.1 standards. Sun also announced JavaPlan, an enterprise development tool dedicated to the visual design and generation of Java applications. And finally, Sun unveiled more JavaBeans components that will be bundled with these new development products.
Just a few weeks prior to the show, Sun revealed that its chief technical officer Eric Schmidt was leaving Sun to become the CEO of Novell Inc. (Orem, Utah). The split was apparently an amicable one, because Sun has since announced a strategic partnership with the struggling network company. Novell is trying to reposition itself as an Internet networking provider, turning its NetWare OS platform into a middle-tier development and deployment platform for Java businesses and network services logic for Intranets and the Intranet -- so this partnership is quite a logical (and intelligent) one.
Rational also announced that it has acquired Performance Awareness Corp. and its preVue-C/S testing tool and that it plans to acquire Pure Atria Corp. as well. This is only the latest in a series of acquisitions Rational has made over the past six months, which include Microsoft's Visual Test technology, testing tool vendor SQA Inc., and requirements-management vendor Requisite Inc.
Asymetrix (Bellevue, Wash.) announced two new editions of its SuperCede Java RAD tool: SuperCede Database and SuperCede Java/ActiveX. Each product will include a special edition of TVObjects' (Princeton, N.J.) Visual Basic-to-Java translation technology, so you can migrate your existing VB applications to Java and the Internet. Asymetrix is also bundling version-control technology from StarBase Corp. (Irvine, Calif.).
IBM Corp. (Armonk, N.Y.) announced that it is adopting JavaBeans as its component technology across all of IBM's application development tools, from Visual Age for Java to other, non-Java tools. IBM will also provide an ActiveX-to-JavaBeans conversion utility.
Rogue Wave Software Inc. (Corvallis, Ore.) made two announcements for development teams that are deploying C++ servers and Java clients. The first product, Serialize.h++ 1.0, is a C++ class library that uses the Java serialization mechanism in the JDK 1.1 to exchange objects and data with Java programs. Rogue Wave also announced an upgrade to its foundation class library for Java developers, JTools 2.0. Version 2.0 contains new classes for exchanging data with C++ programs.
Object database vendor O2 Technology Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.) announced version 5.0 of its object DBMS, which will include a page-server architecture and object-level locking capabilities, call-back locking, in-memory RPCs, a standard ODBC interface, and support for multithreading.