Speaking at the NetBeans Software Day event, held prior to the official start of the JavaOne 2006 conference, Tim Cramer, executive director of Java tools at Sun, said official announcements were expected shortly. Neither JBoss nor AMD could be reached for comment on Monday afternoon.
"[JBoss is] another very large community of people, and we're going to just kind of team up and have both of our communities join forces," Cramer said.
JBoss will work on an application server plug-in for JBoss enabling NetBeans-based applications to be deployed to the JBoss application server, Cramer said. JBoss also is a member of the rival Eclipse Foundation for open source tooling.'
AMD as part of its NetBeans participation will endorse the Sun Studio compiler as well as a new C and C++ plug-in available now in beta format for NetBeans, Cramer said. He noted Sun uses AMD processors in some of its computers.
Sun officials at the event also touched on the current hot topic of whether or not to open-source the Java programming language
"At some point, I think it'll happen," Cramer said. New Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has said it will happen, said Cramer said.
But an imminent release of Java to open source does not seem to be in the cards. James Gosling, the founder of Java and CTO of Sun's enterprise and developer group, last week dismissed calls for moving Java to a fully open source format in an interview last week.
At Monday's event, Rich Green, the new executive vice president of software at Sun, stressed compatibility concerns that have arisen whenever the subject of an open source path for Java is suggested. "We need to keep Java whole," and keep it compatible and reliable, Green said.
"The reality is we have come together with [a brand] so we can maintain the properties with compatibility," Green said. Sun will be talking this week about empowering the community around Java and encouraging participation in the Java Community Process for amending Java, Green said.
Cramer said he anticipates that compatibility issues raised around an open source Java would be addressed through a licensing program.
Schwartz briefly addressed the audience at NetBeans Software Day, joking about his recent elevation to CEO in place of Scott McNealy. "I did in fact get a new job recently and I was just so tired of being number 2 and now I'm number 1," Schwartz said.
He also stressed that better tools improve developer creativity and the Internet.
Also during the event, attendees witnessed a demonstration of a planned NetBeans technology called Jackpot, which provides capabilities for re-engineering Java source code. "This is your magic window to reach in to other people's code," said Tom Ball, who has worked on the project as a senior staff engineer at Sun.
"One of the things Jackpot is doing is riding the wave of innovation that is coming from the Mustang compiler," Ball said. Mustang is a planned future version of Java.
Sun also plans to contribute more of its tools portfolio to open source via NetBeans, said Bob Brewin, chief architect and tools strategist at Sun. Sun tools functions will be usable with NetBeans.
"Over time, you're going to start seeing more and more contributions coming from Sun's tools portfolio into open source," Brewin said. This would give NetBeans users capabilities such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) design and UML (Unified Modeling Language) modeling.