HP Unveils Component Development Environment

Making the complexities of Java easier to work with has become a theme at JavaOne, as tool suppliers continued to unveil their wares at the San Francisco conference this week.

Notable among them was Hewlett-Packard, normally a restrained participant on the Java bandwagon promoted by its arch Unix server rival, Sun Microsystems. HP unveiled Component Development Environment for its OpenView Internet Usage Manager, a tool originally dedicated to helping telecommunications companies track call traffic and bill users.

HP has generated templates for components that can be specified in a drag-and-drop environment and then added as an extension to Internet Usage Manager. The tool is used to collect network, system, and service usage figures that are analyzed and used for cost allocation to user departments and billing, explains Steve Glasgow, director of software developers programs.

"It has been nontrivial to create components for Internet Usage Manager in the past," he said. A programmer needed detailed knowledge of IUM to build a component that extended its function, but many businesses needed such components.

The templates developed by HP serve as plug-ins to the Eclipse open-source workbench. HP is a board member, or steward, of the Eclipse open-source project, founded by IBM to bring together efforts to have Java tools work in a shared environment.

Glasgow said an existing Component Development Environment template speeds the development of components to measure the use of voice-activated systems, determining who should be charged for their use. "We have a whole series of future plug-ins planned around Web services" that would measure the use of XML-based services, Web Services Description Language-based services, such as directories, and use of voice or multimedia on the Web, he said.

"Sun has seen what Microsoft did with Visual Studio .Net. It wants to make Java 2 Enterprise Edition programming easier," notes Zack Urlocker, VP of marketing for M7 Corp., which makes M7 Application Assembly Suite, a repository designed for holding diverse Java application components, including database schemas as well as code segments.

Meanwhile, Borland Corp. emphasized its previously announced Application Life Cycle Management strategy at the show and introduced Borland Enterprise Studio 6, a new package of development tools that it has tied into its JBuilder integrated development environment.

The package includes Borland Caliber, a requirements definition tool; Together Edition for Jbuilder 6.1, a design tool; Optimizeit Suite 5.5 for testing newly developed code for bottlenecks; Borland Enterprise Server 5.2 application server; JDataStore 6 for deploying new applications; and Borland StarTeam for automated configuration and change management for source code.