Blogging Roller

Sun's new web application development tool, Rave, sounds really cool. Here what the bloggers are saying about it:

Simon Brown: Anyway, if you've done any programming with a 4GL environment like PowerBuilder, VisualBasic, etc then this is pretty much the same, albeit for the web. You can drag and drop components on to the canvas (the web page) and hook them up with event listeners, datasources and web services. All in all a very quick way to build webapps and certainly aimed at the corporate developer market that Sun is trying to bring over to the Java world in an effort to significantly increase the developer community. Good demo, nice tool.

Dehashish Chakrabarty: Sue Spielman has some more details on Project Rave. The key phrase here is "simplified development model",  in accordance with Sun's aim of  "lowering the barrier and entry point for the corporate developers" and "sucking up the VB corporate/IT programmers into the Java platform". It's another thing that, as Sue reported, a 404 error surfaced during Hammerhead's demo at JavaOne.  Rave uses NetBeans Platform as its base (though visually it will be different) alongwith JavaServer Faces and JDBC Rowsets standards. And if you didn't know Sun has no plan to make this project open source.

Cedric Beust: I have to say I was quite surprised by the slickness of Rave, until I realized why: it doesn't seem to be based on NetBeans. Well, that's my impression. I was a bit far from the screen to be sure, but it certainly didn't look like the standard NetBeans interface to me.

Andres Aguiar: Project Rave is a tool for those guys. It looks cool, and it's fast, as they built it with no extensibility hooks as other more ambitious IDEs (NetBeans, Eclipse). Right now it just supports Web applications, and it's not targeted to the EJB developer, it's for guys that want to access their database directly, with tools to do data binding directly from the database, etc. It targets the same people as ASP.NET Web Matrix.