Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) 
announced this week the availability of four new plug-in modules for the open source 
NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE).
The new plug-in modules include Jackpot, Real Time Java technology, Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT) and Grid Compute Server for NetBeans. The new toolkit additions are part of Sun's commitment to bring new ideas directly from Sun engineers to the developer community.
Spanning the Spectrum
"We're pleased to see Sun making efforts to expand their open source IDE and think the combination of Java, C, and C++ will make for a powerful developer platform," said Terri Hall, vice president, software alliances, AMD (NYSE: AMD) . "Sun and AMD have formed a strong alliance around new products like the Sun Ultra 20 and Ultra 40 Workstations -- which clearly target the developer audience. Encouraging collaboration among the core developers in the NetBeans community is a sure way to drive improvements in performance and productivity on our platform."
The plug-ins span the spectrum of Java technology, from programming for Java-enabled devices to grid computing and vividly demonstrate the broad range and depth of support for Java technologies available in the NetBeans IDE, according to Jeff Jackson, senior vice president, Java Developer Platforms at Sun. "We're glad to offer some of the hottest products coming out of Sun's research and development organization directly to the growing NetBeans community," he said.
Jackpot Module
The Jackpot module -- intelligent code re-engineering -- was developed by Sun Labs and provides the ability to perform scriptable transformations on Java technology source code. The Jackpot module enables "next-generation refactoring" -- global source code transformations based on a comprehensive model of the project's structure.Jackpot can be used to find bad coding practices and repair them, or upgrade projects to use new versions of libraries. These changes are either made with scripts that use a custom Java pattern matching language, or with Java classes that extend the Jackpot transformation engine. The module comes with support for writing transformations so that it is easy to develop and distribute custom transformations within engineering organizations.
Real Time Java Technology
The Real-Time Java module provides editing support for applications using real time APIs for Java technology (JSR 1), while supporting the cross-platform development features needed to create real-time applications intended for specific devices.Real-Time Java technology regulates the ability to reliably and predictably reason about and control the temporal behavior of program logic.
Web Services Interoperability Technology
Web Services Interoperability Technology is a key component of the Sun internal project code-named "Tango" and part of the ongoing Web services interoperability efforts between Sun and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) . The WSIT module will help facilitate development of cross-platform Web services.
WSIT provides capabilities that enable higher levels of quality of service and reliability than is typical in Web services software. Sun is releasing a NetBeans 5.5 plug-in for WSIT to help facilitate development of cross-platform Web services.
Compute Server Plug-in for NetBeans
Compute Server Plug-in for NetBeans helps developers take advantage of countless opportunities for innovation that are presented by the Sun Grid Compute Utility. Sun Grid provides easy and affordable access to a substantial computing resource for an all-inclusive price of US$1 per CPU per hour.
The Compute Server plug-in is intended to help Java technology developers use the Sun Grid Compute Utility for the distributed execution of parallel computations. The plug-in supports Java developers' use of familiar NetBeans development and debugging tools to create applications based on the Compute Server programming model.
Features include Compute Server project templates, support for local (off-grid) debugging, and automatic packaging of application code and data for delivery to the Sun Grid. The Compute Server plug-in is available for free download under the Apache License 2.0, as part of the Compute Server project.
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