Java Tools Community To Fly Under Radar at JavaOne 2004

Yet the JTC hasn't made a peep since its inception, and it plans to have a low-key presence at JavaOne, according to Sun Microsystems spokespeople.

At JavaOne, the JTC plans to announce that new companies are joining the community, although Sun spokespeople declined to identify the vendors. Executives from Sun and Oracle also will host one session about the JTC at the show on Tuesday night, said Rich Main, director of Java development environments with SAS, a co-founder of the JTC. But so far, there has been little talk about the group's activities--aside from the fact that its Web site, www.javatools.org, is up and running.

When the JTC was formed, founding members such as Sun, BEA Systems, Oracle and SAS said the community aimed to work alongside the Java Community Process (JCP) to find a common foundation for the industry's myriad Java tools. But the JTC's efforts to date suggest the group is little more than a marketing play--a notion that some industry observers floated at the JTC's inception. The JTC was unveiled just a month before the first annual conference for users of the Eclipse framework, created by IBM to bring together disparate developer tools into a unified platform. At the time of the JTC's formation, one analyst warned that the group could become a hollow effort if it didn't create infrastructure for its processes and define how it should behave. Those details remain up in the air.

Dave Cotter, director of developer marketing at BEA, conceded that it has taken the JTC longer than expected to get its act together. But he told CRN Wednesday that the group has "imminent" plans to unveil specific activities and infrastructure. "It is very, very real, and everyone is very aligned to fulfill [on its promises]," Cotter said.

The Eclipse effort, meanwhile, has been clearly defined and productive, solution providers said. IBM created the framework in November 2001, and then in February 2004 spun off the effort into the Eclipse Foundation, an open-source community that last week released version 3 of the Eclipse IDE.

Eclipse has garnered widespread support among tools vendors and developers as a way to plug different Java developer tools--as well as tools for other development platforms--into a common framework. The platform's latest version has been touted by some developers as a clear maturation of a foundation for developer tools and a framework for building applications.

But further complicating the process of defining a common foundation for Java development tools is Project Beehive, BEA's move last month to open-source the core application framework of its WebLogic Workshop tool. BEA executives said Beehive, now a project under the Apache Software Foundation, gives the Java market a unified programming model so developers don't have to learn multiple models from different vendors to build applications.

Joe Lindsay, CTO of Costa Mesa, Calif.-based solution provider eBuilt, said Beehive is contrary to the JTC, although BEA's Cotter disputes that claim. Yet Lindsay said the presence of so many efforts to unite the Java development community is actually driving it farther apart.

"The Java camp is more divided than ever," Lindsay said, adding that Microsoft--the company that the Java community is trying to align its efforts against--is hard at work to simplify its toolset for its significant developer community.

Shawn Willett, principal analyst at research firm Current Analysis, agreed that vendors' disparate efforts to come up with a de facto foundation for Java development tools is diluting Java community efforts and giving Microsoft yet another edge with developers. "There are now too many competing [Java] bodies vying for new standards, both officially and unofficially," Willett said. "All the vendors--IBM, BEA, Sun, Oracle--should realize that a compromise is in their best interest. Otherwise, Java will suffer, and the ultimate winner would be Microsoft."

Indeed, as the Java tools vendors jockey for position, tools efforts at Microsoft are rolling right along.

At its TechEd conference last month, Microsoft unveiled Visual Studio 2005 Team System, a modeling and collaborative development tool slated to ship next year. Microsoft said the tool promises to enable developers to test the security of their applications in advance, capture and model application functionality on screen and preview how an application will run before it's actually deployed. Whether that tool will be ready for prime time on release remains to be seen, however (see story).

While there's no doubt that Java vendors will present a unified front at JavaOne and rally the Java development community against Microsoft, it's also clear that many developers are impatient with Java community infighting and just want better tools. And if Java vendors don't get their act together soon, some of those developers may turn to Microsoft to give them what they need.