Sun Microsystems' NetBeans integrated development environment gathered a little more momentum with several third-party developers announcing products that support the standard.

In a related announcement, spurred by the growth of the NetBeans partner ecosystem, Sun said it will merge the NetBeans Partner Program with its own Partner Advantage Program. The Sun program essentially better enables partners to leverage the company's full range of products.

Among the third parties releasing products supporting the NetBeans IDE is Visual Paradigm International, a specialist in modeling solutions. Specifically, the Visual Paradigm product makes sure NetBeans developers can get at the more advanced unified modeling language functions contained in NetBeans.

"Keeping in sync between developers' source code and UML models is a tedious job. We think our product does a good job of integrating with NetBeans, and so enhances the entire model-build-deploy software development process," said Angus Chan, CTO of Visual Paradigm.

Another developer showing commitment for the NetBeans IDE is Mobile Distillery, which announced the availability of its mobile application production and testing services as a plug-in. The newly compatible plug-in makes it possible for developers to use Celsius, the company's automated porting suite, from within the IDE. The enhanced product can better assure developers about the level of compatibility of the applications on existing and new mobile handsets, which should result in greater time and cost savings, according to Eric Lemarechal, Mobile Distillery's co-founder and CEO.

A third developer backing the IDE standard is Elixir Technology, which focuses on business intelligence-related products, and said its plug-in is now available. The plug-in offers corporate and third-party developers a set of capabilities that allow them to weave integrated BI features into their NetBeans-developed applications.

The newly compatible product now allows developers to more easily get at the underlying APIs in order to infuse BI capabilities into their applications Elixir CEO Shih-Hor Lau said. Developers can use a range of tools to do this, including Java, Ruby, and Ajax.

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