More SOA-open source convergence: Sun upgrades NetBeans

A new report indicates that Sun Microsystems plans to include SOA functionality within the next release of the NetBeans IDE, and will be extended for other languages besides Java.

NetBeans is an open-source IDE -- under Sun's stewardship -- that competes with the open-source Eclipse development tools platform. Surveys I have seen and conducted, however, put NetBeans far behind Eclipse in both adoption and mindshare. Can SOA-enablement give the IDE a needed boost?

The impending NetBeans 5.5 release will boost orchestration of data in an SOA, and feature a set of visual XML tools to refactor XML so name changes can be propagated throughout an application. "It basically creates a visual hierarchical structure of your XML trees that are kind of comprehensible," Dan Roberts, director of marketing for developer tools at Sun, is quoted as saying. "When you're doing SOA, quite a large amount of your work is actually in mapping and orchestrating data exchanges between various applications."

Sun is also incorporating its acquired SeeBeyond technology within NetBeans to support BPEL (Business Process Execution Language for Web Services)-based orchestration. "BPEL allows developers to actually create those orchestrations and express how those components talk to each other," he said.