Oracle Corp. and The Eclipse Foundation, among others, intend to disclose open-source plans at the conference. Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems Inc., the creator and steward of Java, has hinted that it will make several open-source announcements in addition to unveiling a new version of enterprise Java.
IT staffers at E! Entertainment Television Inc. in Los Angeles, will be on the lookout for open-source and commercial Java tools at the show as the company seeks to cut its code-writing chores, said David Johnson, manager of software engineering.
Johnson said the cable television outfit has ramped up its use of open-source Java tools over the past year so it can do extensive work with the software without having to commit to a particular vendor.
"The traditional 30-day 'try before you buy' that vendors give isn't enough to fully evaluate how a tool or framework can be incorporated into an existing enterprisewide application," Johnson said. "Open-source tools give us a jumping-off point to experiment with a new standard."
Johnson also said that open-source communities are more likely than vendors to respond to requests for help with the tools.
Likely announcements
Oracle plans to announce that it is submitting its AJAX rendering kit to the open-source community, most likely to the The Apache Software Foundation, said Ted Farrell, Oracle chief architect and vice president of tools and middleware.
The Eclipse Foundation will unveil a community portal to promote open-source projects and a new project to promote the creation of model-based development tools in the Eclipse Community, said Ian Skerrett, director of marketing for the Ottawa-based open-source community.
Peder Ulander, Sun's vice president of software marketing, declined to provide details of the company's open-source plans for the conference. Other Sun officials, including Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for SOA and integration platforms, earlier this month said that the company would be making open-source announcements at the show.
Michael Goulde, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said he expects users to seek out open-source products more often as adoption of the technology expands within corporate development organizations.
Dimitrios Gianninas, rich Internet application developer at Optimal Payments Inc., said his company in the past year has moved to replace several commercial Java tools with open-source tools. Gianninas is not attending JavaOne.
For example, the Montreal-based electronic payments processor is replacing its Enterprise JavaBean components with the open-source Java-based Spring framework. The company has also replaced BEA Systems Inc.'s Java-based WebLogic Workshop development tools with Xfire, an open-source Java service- oriented architecture framework, Gianninas said.
"In all these cases, we've found that these open-source solutions are simple to use and implement \[and] give us more flexibility," he said. In addition, the open-source tools are often built by Java users "who have encountered the same problems as us and thus know what we need and work toward providing better tools for us," Gianninas noted.
Chris Scheuble, co-owner of The Scheuble Group, an IT consulting firm in Sacramento, said that the spread of open-source technologies can also help IT managers better determine whether engineers have the skills needed for a project.
"It is more simple to ask potential employees if they know JBoss' \[business process management tool] rather than asking if they know business process management methodologies," said Scheuble, who also is director of the Sacramento Java Users Group.
Still, users noted that open-source tools come with drawbacks, including more bugs and only informal support.
"With a commercial product," Johnson said, "you can make a call and yell at somebody."