Eclipse developers to get AJAX access

InfoWorld - Developers accustomed to the Eclipse open-source tools platform will have access to Asynchronous JavaScript plus XML (AJAX) functionality from Genuitec LLC.

The company in December plans to ship MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 4.1, a new version of Genuitec's J2EE integrated development environment that is built on the Eclipse platform and offers support for developing with AJAX. JavaScript editing and debugging are featured.

The AJAX support is being billed by Genuitec as a first step in offering Web 2.0 development capabilities. Web 2.0 refers to an industry effort to transition the Web from a collection of static Web sites to a platform for applications.

"With the AJAX tools, that is our first step into Web 2.0 tooling," said Wayne Parrott, vice president of product development at Genuitec.

"In the future, we're basically going to be integrating more of the AJAX frameworks with the RAD tooling around them," for developing AJAX applications, Parrott said. AJAX, he noted, enables a browser to be used as the application platform for delivering rich Internet applications.

Also featured in Version 4.1 is extended Unified Modeling Language (UML) capabilities, with improved sequence diagrams. The product also offers integration with the Spring and Hibernate open-source Java frameworks, letting developers move between these frameworks.

MyEclipse supports UML 1.3 rather than the more recent 2.0 version of UML because Version 2.0 is mostly geared toward tools vendors rather than developers, according to Genuitec.

Visual design tools for JavaServer Pages and JavaServer Faces in Version 4.1 boost rapid application development of Web pages, according to Genuitec. A WYSIWYG environment is provided.

MyEclipse 4.1 also supports Oracle database deployments with backing for functions such as stored procedures and triggers.

The Professional Edition of MyEclipse 4.1 costs $49.95 per developer per year.