What's Happening at JavaOne

Sun Microsystems says it's about to put an ease-of-use layer, called Project Rave, over its Forte and NetBeans tools and make it simpler for less-skilled Java developers to add Web services to their applications.

Project Rave will be announced this week during JavaOne in San Francisco, the annual Java user event, and will be generally available later this year, says Mark Bauhaus, Sun's VP of Java Web services.

Web services frequently accompany Java applications, Bauhaus says, but "you have to be an object-oriented code warrior" to master all the complexities of Java and standards for the Internet.

With Project Rave, less-skilled Java developers will have drag-and-drop assembly of software components and other visual development aids to help them invoke Web Services Description Language (WSDL), eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML), and Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) used in building a registry of network-based services. Rave will make the standards-based technologies available but the specifics of invoking them will be hidden underneath the Rave environment.

There are three million Java programmers of varying skills registered with Sun's developer network.

At JavaOne, Sun officials will be discussing what to expect in Version 1.4 of Java 2 Enterprise Edition. Bauhaus says 1.4 will offer greater integration between the programming language and Web services. It's due out this fall.

Sun also is seeking to get the Java brand on more consumer products, as it has with Nokia cell phones, which can run small Java applications. And the vendor is set to change its Java logo: The steaming coffee cup now has crisper lines and shows what look like red flames leaping up out of the cup instead of water vapor swirling around it.

Meanwhile, Sap AG will introduce SAP NetWeaver Developer Studio during the show to give Java programmers a means of extending SAP ERP applications, says Michael Bechauf, SAP VP of Java architecture. NetWeaver is SAP's integration platform for tying SAP applications to in-house software and other vendors' packaged applications.

SAP applications are typically written in SAP's proprietary language, ABAP, and are difficult to extend without ABAP programming skills. Rather than convert more programmers to its language, SAP has decided it needs a general-purpose Java development environment. At JavaOne, SAP will offer NetWeaver Developer Studio as a plug-in for Eclipse, the open-source programmers workbench, Bechauf says.

BEA Systems also will be at JavaOne talking about the second version of its WebLogic Workshop, a framework for optimizing Java applications to run on the WebLogic application server. The release of Workshop 8.1--the version number has to stay in step with the WebLogic application server's--is scheduled for later this summer, but BEA will use the show to illustrate how developers can build WebLogic applications in a more unified way, says Carl Sjogreen, senior product manager for WebLogic Workshop. In effect, Workshop encourages best programming practices for applications running on WebLogic.

Workshop 8.1 isn't a replacement for Java integrated development environments, such as Borland Software Corp.'s Together Edition for Jbuilder or IBM's VisualAge for Java. It works with such tools and augments their code output for WebLogic operations, Sjogreen says.