Sun Microsystems announced on April 11 that it has open-sourced key components of its Sun Java Studio Enterprise toolset as a project on its NetBeans.org site.
The new project will be released as the NetBeans Enterprise Pack and UML (unified modeling language) features with XML and SOA (service-oriented architecture) development functionality.
The NetBeans Enterprise Pack runs on top of the NetBeans 5.5 IDE (integrated development environment). Features in the NetBeans Enterprise Pack include: Two-way UML modeler for architecting and reverse engineering complex enterprise applications; a set of XML infrastructure and visual editing tools to help developers to manage their XML files; and orchestration and SOA tools—largely tools from Suns acquisition of SeeBeyond—for building composite applications, Sun officials said.
In a blog post on April 11, James Gosling, the creator of Java and chief technology officer of Suns Developer Products group, said: “We open-sourced a whole bunch of enterprise tools today. They should soon be visible on NetBeans.org as the NetBeans Enterprise Pack. The major features are the 2 way UML modeler, fancy XML tools and all the SOA and orchestration tools.”
Jeff Jackson, senior vice president of Java, Enterprise, and Developer Software at Sun, called Java Studio Enterprise the “crown jewel” of Suns tools.
“Making it available to the NetBeans community, weve expanded the range of features that developers can adopt, customize and deploy for more productive development with the Java Enterprise System,” Jackson said in a statement.
“The NetBeans Enterprise Pack represents a significant step in Suns renewed commitment to developers by sharing technology, cultivating community and investing in open source.”
Moreover, also in a statement, David Freels, software architect at Digital Reasoning Systems, said, “It allows me to model complex business systems and then seamlessly generate code, or synchronize with existing code, saving me hours of time refactoring code and then updating the model.”
Sun has made much of its software available free to customers and has committed to open-sourcing its entire software portfolio.