August 14, 2000

Printer ready

Finding Components On The Web

Development portals offer tested, certified, reusable code that helps speed projects

By Andy Patrizio

More on TKTK:

InternetWeek Portals Tame Chaotic Content (7/10/00)

Send Us Your Feedback

ere are a few of the development portals we've been able to find on the Web. They offer a variety of products and services that can directly influence the bottom line.

ComponentSource.com
The first and the biggest, with 3,500 components for sale, ComponentSource.com not only sells components from developers, it has approached private companies and encouraged them to sell some of their technologies as reusable components. The most notable taker is EDS, which offers almost a dozen financial-calculation objects for sale on the site.

"We show them the benefits of getting an extra revenue stream, and it also gets them to bring those components up to quality standards, which makes it easier to reuse across their own apps," says Sam Patterson, CEO of ComponentSource.com.

ComponentSource.com has the widest reach of the component resellers, offering sales to 130 countries with toll-free support lines in 31 countries and support in five languages. It carries Enterprise JavaBeans, Component Object Model objects, Delphi objects, and Visual Basic objects. It also offers a source code escrow on products, so if the developer of an object you purchase goes out of business you can get the source, and a purchasing system so companies can buy objects via purchase orders rather than with credit cards or checks.

ComponentSource.com offers classes for developers on how to create commercial components and release them on the open market. It also offers white papers on how to create and document components properly for customers.

Collab.Net
Collab.Net, founded in July 1999 by Apache Software Foundation co-founder Brian Behlendorf, provides a developer marketplace, hosting, and other professional services to facilitate collaborative, open-source software development. Because many of the projects supported on Collab.Net are open source, the buyer gets both the compiled component and the code.

Its sourceXchange marketplace allows developers to offer their components or bid on requests for proposals for custom programming jobs. Developers can comment on the sourceXchange message board on open projects, even if they don't participate. Collab.Net offers consulting services for open-source projects, and staff expertise includes Apache, Apache/Extensible Markup Language, Jakarta (the all-Java Apache server), and Mozilla.

Collab.Net also hosts the NetBeans .org site, which is sponsored by Sun Microsystems. NetBeans is a modular integrated development environment written entirely in Java. It supports Java and other languages as well. Forte for Java Community Edition, the freely downloadable version of Sun's Forte for Java compiler (see p. 86), uses the same IDE that's in NetBeans Developer 3.0.

Flashline.com
Flashline.com, established in 1998 by Books.com founder Charles Stack, offers JavaBeans, EJBs, and Microsoft COM components; quality-assurance testing; auction-based outsourcing; an open component registry; and programming articles and resources. A component certification program was unveiled at JavaOne in June, and a regular monthly column by the Cutter Consortium's Paul Harmon is planned.

The company is partnered with BEA Systems, IBM, iPlanet, and Sun, to ensure that components it sells will work with their technologies. It also offers a component manager for Java development kits, providing the developer with a catalog of Java components, documentation, and development resources. It also offers message bases and programming advice.

Forte for Java Portal
Sun acquired Forte Software in October and has begun to restructure the company and its rich enterprise development tools for a number of languages, including Java. Forte for Java combines Java 2 Enterprise Edition with Forte's IDE, which has been used in high-end application development for years.

The Forte for Java portal is a "virtual neighborhood" for Java developers, where they can share Forte for Java code, tools, or components, and discuss issues on the message board.

The Sun name carries a lot of weight, and its list of participating Java vendors offering code on the site is impressive. Among those vendors are Art Technologies Group, Extensibility, Gemstone Systems, Informix, InLine Software, Iona Technologies, iPlanet, and NetObjects.

Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page

---