Officials at Sun, Javalobby and Infravio last week
revealed initiatives in Java development or web
services.
The Sun-led Netbeans open source tools project released an early
version of a profiler tool for troubleshooting. A Sun official said
that Netbeans remains Sun's open source platform of choice, even
though the company had been a subject of speculation that it would
participate in the rival Eclipse open source program.
The Netbeans Profiler is an integrated CPU and memory profiler
offered as a free add-on to the Netbeans 3.6 IDE. It detects issues
such as performance problems and memory leaks.
"What this allows you to do is troubleshoot the performance of
your application in the same IDE you develop your application,"
said Larry Baron, senior product manager for Netbeans at Sun.
The early release, intended for user testing, will be
followed by a beta upgrade when Netbeans 4.0 is released in
December. The production version of Profiler is due with Netbeans
4.1 in early 2005. Version 4.1 will focus on adding Java
development capabilities such as Enterprise Javabeans.
Despite overtures during recent months that Sun might join the
rival Eclipse tools initiative, the status quo remains, according
to Baron. "Right now there are no plans [to join Eclipse]. It
is difficult for me to comment on the future. The future has to
play itself out," Baron said.
Meanwhile, Javalobby last week unveiled JDocs, which is a
centralised database of Java documentation
(www.jdocs.com). Javalobby is an
online community of Java developers with more than 150,000 members
(www.javalobby.org).
Java APIs and libraries are available, such as Java 2 Standard
Edition, Eclipse, Hibernate, Java Server Pages and Apache Jakarta,
said Rick Ross, president of Javalobby.org.
"We are willing to host all APIs so that every developer has a
one-stop shop," Ross said. The site also includes functions for
asking and answering questions.
"We think it will help increase developer productivity, help
people solve problems and allow them to share their insights," said
Ross.
In September Infravio plans to release an upgrade to its
X-registry directory software for registering web services, adding
conformance testing features to make sure web services are being
used properly, said Jeff Tonkel, chief executive and president of
Infravio.
Additionally, the upcoming 4.5.2 release of X-registry boosts
its governance function, which provides a process model for
requesting, authorising and authenticating use of web services.
Improvements will be made to process flows and security, Tonkel
said.
X-registry is based on the UDDI standard for web services
directories and provides a way to catalogue services where
consumers can shop and request their use. Authorisation is also
featured. "X-registry is more like a marketplace for finding and
using web services," Tonkel said.
"The web services industry is still in its early days and there
is a lot of interest in service-oriented architectures and in web
services as a fundamental part of creating an SOA, and people are
doing their early projects," Tonkel said.
"We are hoping that in a couple years it will be rolling out,
but [now] it is one project at a time," he said.
Paul Krill writes for the IDG News Service