Sun kills or spins off their Java tools offerings [1] and are
expected to replace them via acquisition in the next few weeks.
I can only speculate which tools they will choose as I only
sent them half a dozen suggestions over the past year telling them
to get rid of their stupid Java tools and buy some real ones. Smart
Reseller is saying Prague, Czech's NetBeans is set to be acquired.
NetBeans is one of the EdVenture.com Holdings, the Esther Dyson
Angel fund that invests in upcoming Central and Eastern European
companies for large stakes in the company (see [2] for examples).
NetBeans chairman is, of course, Esther Dyson. NetBeans is
a development environment that runs on Solaris, NT, and Linux
(no Irix--those bastards). The product comes with Red Hat Linux 6.0
and supports JDK2 Enterprise edition.
My assessment of the other competitors:
Symantec: Awesome, no better tool
IBM VisualAge: Impossible to build anything with
Inprise (Borland/JBuilder): Okay tool, lacks some revs, external integrations
Most of the JWS people went to iPlanet. Also, nobody could build Java Beans
for their JavaStudio project. The article concludes saying that the market
is standardizing on Java and IBM....not Sun.
Greg
[1] http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/news/0,4538,2340371,00.html
[2] http://www.edventure.com/edventure/ventures.html
-- Greg Bolcer email: gbolcer@endtech.com web: http://www.endtech.com work: 714.505.4970 cell: 714.928.5476 fax: 603.994.0516