Java, meanwhile, may have more staying power as a platform than as a language, a Sun official recognized.

The upcoming 5.5 release of the NetBeans open source IDE features enhancements for SOA and also moves beyond the Java realm with accommodations for C and C++ programming.

NetBeans 5.5 is in a beta test cycle now and is due out later this year. Authored by Sun Microsystems and the NetBeans community at large, the NetBeans platform rivals the higher profile Eclipse open source tools platform.

"We're happy with the healthy competition that exists between the two communities because we believe it spurs innovation and creates better tools for the Java ecosystem," said Dan Roberts, director of marketing for developer tools at Sun. Sun cites 11 million downloads of NetBeans since its inception in June 2000. Eclipse has noted download figures into the tens of millions, although Sun questions how that number was derived.

To boost orchestration of data in an SOA, NetBeans 5.5 will feature a set of visual XML tools to refactor XML so name changes can be propagated throughout an application. "It basically creates a visual hierarchical structure of your XML trees that are kind of comprehensible," Roberts said.