Adversaries and Partners (Continued)

Sun Microsystems' approach to J2EE development is provided in two products: open source NetBeans Java/J2EE IDE and, for JSF specific development, Java Studio Creator. For general J2EE development ranging from basic Java class development to enterprise JavaBeans, Sun's NetBeans development provides an all-encompassing environment.

For more traditional Java development NetBeans packs a powerful punch with a long list of coder-friendly features including refactoring, profiling, code folding, and so on. NetBeans also provides the ability to productively build the more server-oriented objects such as Enterprise JavaBeans, servlets, JSPs, and JSP tag libraries.

For developers strictly using JSF, Sun provides Java Studio Creator, which is a relatively unique product in that it focuses primarily on the corporate developer by providing a complete visual development experience for JSF. Similar to JDeveloper, Studio Creator also provides JSF Web page visual development where JSF components render themselves in the editor. Databinding is also supported in Studio Creator, where it's possible to drag a datasource object such as a table onto a JSF component like a drop-down menu that results in the component being databound to the data object (see Figure 3).

Again, similar to Oracle, Sun is also providing a next-generation set of JSF components, currently code named BraveHeart, which provides similar functionalities to the value-add component libraries such as ADF Faces and MyFaces.

Like Sun, IBM also offers more than one development environment for building different types of J2EE applications—WebSphere Application Developer and Rational Application Developer for WebSphere—although there is some overlap. For example, WebSphere Application Developer provides visual development support for JSF applications. It has a visual, JSF-enabled JSP editor as well as their own JSF component library. Productive property editors are available for editing complex components such as their datagrid (table) component. A similar databinding palette also does databinding easily.

More Tools
There are several other JSF development tools worth mentioning. These tools include Exadel's Studio Pro and M7's NitroX Java IDE. Exadel formerly had products called JSF Studio and Struts Studio, but the features for both were merged into Studio Pro. Studio Pro provides visual JSF development in addition to visual Struts development. Exadel's standout feature is probably its navigation diagrammer. Similar to Oracle JDeveloper and Sun's Studio Creator, it is possible to use Studio Pro to define the entire JSF navigation model, visually.

M7's NitroX development tool also provides powerful JSF development with similar features including Visual JSF page development, visual navigation view (navigation editing is still accomplished through a console or to the source directly.)

Both Studio Pro and NitroX are built on the Eclipse platform and clearly demonstrate that although they are less structured, the J2EE development tools environment is thriving with innovation because the core plumbing required for a Java IDE is offered for free to any company who wishes to turn it into a product.

Time will tell how profitable these smaller companies will remain, but they definitely provide a healthy dose of competition in the very Darwinian environment of J2EE. In short, JSF can compete with ASP. Although Microsoft provides a consistent development environment that covers the full development life cycle along with rich ASP.Net Web control libraries, J2EE also has a formidable arsenal on its side with its many JSF component libraries and new, productive JSF development environments that compete with each other as much as they do with Microsoft.

Now that we've see how J2EE can compete with .Net, especially in the newer areas of Web client development, let's examine how J2EE and .Net can integrate together as well.