Sun Microsystems, Inc. has opened the Early Access release of its groundbreaking visual development environment, Sun Java[tm] Studio Creator. Java Studio Creator, originally called “Project Rave”, was introduced to developers at JavaOne last summer. It is the first 100% Java visual development environment released to date. Developers can find details and download the beta at www.sun.com/jscreator.
Java Studio Creator is a complete develop/debug/deploy solution out of the box, incorporating the first release of production JavaServer[tm] Faces technology, providing greater performance and coding efficiency. The product also includes:
- a Java Enterprise System runtime to allow developers to quickly evaluate applications in pre-production, including the Sun Java System Application Server, Platform Edition;
- a SQL database server;
- the Java[tm] 2, Standard Edition (J2SE[tm]) Software Development Kit (SDK); and developer aids such as examples, tutorials, JavaServer Faces visual components and more.
Seamlessly integrating tools, runtimes and components, Java Studio Creator makes Java coding visual and efficient, enabling developers to focus on application value-add such as user interaction and business logic, instead of system infrastructure and Web services plumbing.
The primary audience for this tool is corporate developers who build workgroup applications to bring data to the desktop. The secondary audience is enterprise developers who will use the tool to build rapid prototypes.
Java Studio Creator is entirely based on Java platform and technology standards, ensuring application portability between deployment environments and development tools, including the Sun Java[tm] Studio Enterprise development solution. Further, developers can use Java Studio Creator to leverage the advanced services created with Java Studio Enterprise and other enterprise-class tools. And, like all of the Sun Java Studio tools, Java Studio Creator is based on the NetBeans[tm] (www.netbeans.org) open source platform. With this Early Access release, Java Studio Creator has been moved to NetBeans version 3.6, which adds stronger JavaServer Pages[tm] syntax support in the code editor, improved code completion and an enhanced debugger. With Java and NetBeans as the foundation technologies, the product line enables developers to prototype quickly and easily using Java Studio Creator, then move up to Java Studio Enterprise to extend application functionality.
Java Studio Creator takes full advantage of new ease-of-use innovations and provides a 100 percent standards-based environment, freeing developers from the limitations of proprietary languages, technologies and runtimes.
Java Studio Creator incorporates JavaServer Faces technology, the recently released framework standard also known as Java Specification Request (JSR) 127 in the Java Community Process[tm] (JCP[tm]). JavaServer Faces technology simplifies development of visual, multi-tier applications which helps to speed coding behind the user interface. Using JavaServer Faces technology, Java Studio Creator supports two-tier Web applications that conform to the Java[tm] BluePrints design patterns, accessing databases and Web services behind dynamic HTML interfaces.
In addition, Java[tm] DataBase Connectivity (JDBC[tm]) RowSet (JSR 114) technology simplifies and streamlines access to databases. Java Studio Creator’s use of this technology boosts productivity by minimizing coding complexity for connecting to databases and performing queries against them.
Other standards supported in Java Studio Creator include JavaServer Pages, Java[tm] XML Pack software and Java[tm] 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE[tm]) 1.3 and 1.4 Web container support.
Platform Support and Availability
Sun’s tools are designed to help developers be more productive by allowing them to defer specific deployment platform choices. Java Studio Creator is slated to support the Solaris[tm] Operating System, Linux and Windows when the tool becomes generally available in Summer 2004. Pricing has not been determined. For more information on Sun’s developer product lines, please see developers.sun.com.
