Borland warms to Sun for Java

Borland is the latest company to join the Sun-backed Java Tools Community (JTC) and has extended support for Sun's Java 2 Extended Edition (J2EE) application server, Java System Application Server 7.

The JTC was formed in January to promote Java technology standards for development tools.

John Harrison, Borland's European Java products line manager, told vnunet.com: "The JTC will allow industry to work out a lot of differences in advance of the Java Server Requests [JSRs]."

Borland did not join JTC when it was first formed because it did not want to compete with existing JSRs and the Java Community Process (JCP), he added.

Comprising major Java development companies, the JCP issues and debates the JSR Java change and enhancement requests, in a process that has been criticised for being too long-winded. Harrison said the JTC would help speed up the overall process.

Borland has also improved its JBuilder integrated development environment's (IDE) support for Sun's application server, with enhancements to its J2EE 1.3 output and the addition of a J2EE 1.4 plug-in.

JBuilder already supports IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic and JBoss J2EE application servers, as well as Borland Enterprise Server.

"Java is deployed in more organisations than .Net in [Borland's] customer base. It is very stable and robust; .Net is playing catch-up," said Harrison.

Borland is working on high-level model-driven development using the universal modelling language and model-driven architecture standards.

Harrison said some of these capabilities existed already in a fairly rudimentary way. But he added that he expected this to evolve into a full implementation to support both JBuilder and Delphi IDEs by the end of the year.