Java Studio Enterprise 8.0 is expected to feature tools that potentially provide non-IT staff, those in the business-side of a company, with greater control over software projects.
Jeff Jackson, Java developer platform and developer strategy vice president, said during a broad tools, Java and Solaris 10 announcement the company is whittling down a long list of features for Java Studio Enterprise 8.0, due next spring. Jackson did not say, though, what features the company is evaluating.
Should Sun decide to include such features in Java Studio Enterprise 8.0, the company would follow in the path of ISVs including Borland Software Corp and Mercury Interactive Corp.
In August, Borland bought SPC Estimate Professional from Software Productivity Center (SPC) Inc to provide business managers with greater ability to control and predict project investment and staffing resources, time to market and other associated risks involved in software projects.
SPC Estimate Professional is integrated with Borland’s CaliberRM requirements gathering software, under Borland’s Software Delivery Optimization (SDO) strategy,
Borland is attempting to attract vice presidents of application development and more management-focused executives with SDO. The goal is to close the gap between the business, which specify projects, and the IT team who build them.
Mercury, meanwhile, offers features among its portfolio that provide a visual front-end to its performance management tools to deliver greater visibility into application performance by non-technical staff. Smaller vendors like Segue Software Inc are also taking steps to make performance data more accessible.
While it is unclear exactly how far Sun plans to follow these ISVs, the company has been inching towards a more rounded application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy this year, notably with application modeling capabilities added through integrated support for Unified Modeling Language (UML).
In May, Sun licensed Embarcadero Technologies Inc’s Describe UML 6.1 for Java Studio Enterprise 7.0, currently in beta and due next January. Java Studio Enterprise 7.0 will provide round-tripping the ability to make changes in an application model and for that change to be automatically reflected in the code, and vice versa.
Other Java Studio Enterprise 7.0 features include an application profiler and secure Instant Messaging (IM) between developers who can share and update code.
Also announced was Sun Studio 10 for C/C++ and Fortran, which will be available with the Solaris 10 operating system, and which Sun said compiles code up to 60% faster than Studio 9.0 and open source compilers.
Beta availability of a 64-bit Java Virtual Machine (JVM) for Solaris 10 on Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Inc’s Opteron was also announced. A 64-bit JVM, with Software Development Kit (SDK), means developers can use Java tools to construct data- and processing-intensive applications for the forthcoming Solaris 10. Developers can also construct Solaris 10 applications build using the latest edition of Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE), version 5.0.
