By William Fellows
As we predicted (CI No 3,765), Sun Microsystems Inc has plugged the gaping hole in its Java tools product line by acquiring NetBeans Inc, the Czech company which has been giving away a set of programming tools enabling developers to write Java applications on Linux, NT or Unix. NetBeans claims 100,000 copies of NetBeans Developer IDE been downloaded this year already. There are reckoned to be 750,000 Java developers worldwide. The value of the acquisition was not disclosed but Sun said it would not be material to its earnings.
Sun has been scrambling to put together a comprehensive Java application tools for a couple of reasons. First, the very future of ISVs which have traditionally supplied the volume developer market such as Inprise (Borland) and Symantec are hanging in the balance with the possibility the market could be handed to Sun’s arch enemy Microsoft Corp.
Second, Sun needs programming tools to support application development for the internet server software from its iPlanet Sun-Netscape products. This in turn will help drive sales of server systems to run these server-side programs, which is where Sun makes its money. More than anything, Sun fears the momentum Java is gathering could so easily stall if tools for program writers are not widely available. Sun even junked what little it already had in the way of Java development tools – Java WorkShop and Java Studio – clearly feeling they were inadequate for the task in hand.
In August Sun took its first step, buying enterprise application development specialist Forte Software Inc for $540m. Forte recently refocused its product strategy around a new Java development environment called SynerJ. Sun has given Forte CEO Marty Sprinzen charge of its development tools division, which reports to Pat Sueltz who Sun recently hired from IBM Corp to run its Software Products and Platforms division. Sprinzen takes charge of NetBeans and its 40 developers in Prague, where Sun says it expects to raise its level of investment.
Sun will integrate NetBeans with Forte’s SynerJ Java application development environment and rebrand NetBeans, SynerJ and its other development tools as Forte products. SynerJ comprises a development environment and repository, assembler (generator) and application server.
The NetBeans Developer IDE is being renamed Forte for Java under the new branding Sun has adopted for its tools. Sun says it will release a new community edition later this year. It sounds as though Sun will make the code available through its pseudo-open source Community Source License model, which is different to the free licenses that NetBeans currently offers. The Community license enables a company to use and change code as long as material changes are passed back to Sun and royalties paid when products are sold to customers.
The company will create an internet edition of the product for writing applications for small businesses that will run on a single web server. It’s due in the first quarter. Forte for Java enterprise edition is Forte’s SynerJ. Sun’s Fortran and C++ WorkShop tools become Forte Fortran and C++.
Trying to untangle its web application server strategy, Sun now says it will have only one. That’s the iPlanet product into which NetDynamics and Netscape/Kiva are being merged. SynerJ’s web application server will be dropped and from January SynerJ customers will get an early access version of the iPlanet code to target development on. A full release of the merged product is due in March.
A new 4.0 cut of the Forte 4GL due in the second half of next year will be fitted with support for Java and the repository in SynerJ. Forte claims 500 4GL customers. The repository will be extended to support the iPlanet web application server and NetBeans products and will be able to store objects from XML, Java and Microsoft COM environments. Forte’s Fusion product addresses the application integration space.
NetBeans founder, Roman Stanek used to run VSD, a government-owned company that distributed Informix database software. He stumbled across the idea for NetBeans on the web pages of a group of local Czech university students when he was surfing the internet. As part of a course project, the students had built Xelfi, a Java development tool which worked on multiple operating systems. The company says NetBeans IDE is one of the first products to generate Java Foundation Class (JFC) code without the use of any third-party framework.
Stanek says the product is more customizable than Windows-based Java development tools. He says it also gives third-party developers the ability to build add-on modules to NetBeans to enhance its capabilities. The downside, however, is that because it is coded entirely in Java, developers need particularly powerful machines for it to run at a satisfactory speed.
Tech guru and venture capitalist Esther Dyson and other angel investors invested just over $1m in the company in two rounds of financing.
