Developers Get Team Tools

As Microsoft Corp. readies its new application development tool set for team development, a raft of Java and other platform tool vendors are delivering solutions of their own—now.

Gupta Technologies LLC, DataSource Inc., JBoss Inc. and BEA Systems Inc. are each taking on team development with new tools.

Gupta, of Redwood Shores, Calif., this week will announce Team Developer 2005, a team development tool for Linux and Windows development. Raghavan Gurumurthy, director of engineering at Gupta, said the product opens a new market to developers who want to deliver applications on Linux.

DataSource, of Greenbelt, Md., last month introduced its Jetson tool, which brings automation to accelerate J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) development team productivity and decreases costs, said Pamela Hopkins, president of DataSource.

Jetson provides automation of Enterprise JavaBeans-based development; support for databases such as Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server; and an interface for adding business rules and data requirements. Jetson also lets users include Java components from other sources.

Atlanta-based JBoss last month announced JEMS (JBoss Enterprise Middleware System), an open-source architecture for developing, deploying and maintaining applications.

"It's basically a plug-and-play approach to middleware," said Mark Fleury, CEO of JBoss. "[In all,] we have 15 different projects packaged in five different products."

JEMS includes JBoss Application Server, Hibernate object-relational mapping software, The Apache Software Foundation's Tomcat Web servlet engine, JBoss JBPM, JBoss-IDE, JBoss Cache, the JGroups multicast communications tool and JBoss Portal.

JBoss competitor BEA Systems, of San Jose, Calif., released the public beta of the next version of its application server, WebLogic Server 9.0. The server delivers support for building service-based applications, a robust messaging infrastructure, and simplified management and administration. It is also the platform for the rest of the WebLogic Platform products. WebLogic Server 9.0 is slated for delivery this summer, officials said.