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A Look at the Latest Java Studio Creator
Java developers will soon have a visual Web development environment.
by Terrence O'Donnell

November 1, 2005

While attending the recent 2005 TopCoder Open event sponsored by Sun Microsystems I got a look at the early access release of Sun's Java Studio Creator, an IDE that provides a rapid, visual, drag-and-drop Web application building environment that is similar to the visual environment experience that developers who work with Visual Basic or ASP.NET are familiar with. It includes a set of JavaServer Faces (JSF) components, supports AJAX through a component library, and provides all Java standards-based code that results from a Creator application.

In fact, it's the corporate developers, particularly those who have been working with the Microsoft platform, that make up a significant portion of the audience Sun is targeting for this product. Joe Nuxoll, senior software architect, Sun Microsystems, and lead Java Studio Creator engineer affirmed this target audience focus for the IDE that is built on NetBeans 4.1. Nuxoll said a primary goal is to get as many developers onto the Java platform as possible. "We're aiming for [developers] that are building corporate applications that are used to more visual environments. This is for the VB folks, developers that are used to using VB on the Microsoft platform. We want to move them onto the Java platform," Nuxoll said.

David Folk, product line manager for Java Studio Creator, emphasized that the product can also have relevance for architects. He said that in addition to users of Visual Basic or other WYSIWYG development environments, the target audience, under the right conditions, can be architects who in the course of productivity planning need a rapid development tool to build something quickly "where you're trading some level of control for productivity," Folk said.

An example of the GUI-environment similarity to Visual Basic is Java Studio Creator's query editor, which provides a similar look and feel and lets you visually manipulate a query very much the same way. Creator offers coders comfortable working with a rapid, visual development environment interfaces the means to work with database queries without having to author them in SQL; although, as Creator's engineers are quick to point out, you can go in and parse the query if you need to. In this way, Sun is billing Java Studio Creator as a two-way tool that is good for developing production-type applications and not just a tool for prototype development. Developers can make changes in the property sheet or GUI, but just as easily go into the JSP source code and make changes there as well.