Microsoft Rolls Out New ASP.Net Resources For Developers

The software giant unveiled an update to Microsoft ASP.Net Web Matrix, a lightweight tool for building ASP.Net applications first released as a free download a year ago.

Microsoft said it is also is offering new ASP.Net Starter Kits, comprised of five sample applications developers can use as reference guides for developing ASP.Net applications.

The sample applications range from e-commerce storefronts to community portals to data reporting applications. Microsoft offers documented source code for each sample for the developer's reference, company executives said.

The kits are available at www.asp.net/starterkits.

Microsoft also is working with several Web hosting services--including Brinkster, ServerBeach and Rackspace--to provide hosted environments for deploying ASP.Net applications. More information can be found at http://www.asp.net/hosters.

In the meantime, Sun Microsystems and Java software vendors are working to simplify the development of rich Internet applications using Java as an alternative to ASP.Net.

Under Project Rave, Sun later this year plans to make available a tool using several new standards--such as Java Server Faces, JDBC-Rowset and several Java APIs for XML--to allow developers to rapidly build Web-based, database-driven Java applications.

Java Server Faces is a proposed standard under consideration by the Java Community Process (JCP) that simplifies development of the presentation layer of Java applications. The JCP, which is overseen by Sun and includes more than 100 companies, creates Java standards.

Oracle, too, included Java Server Faces technology in its latest update to its Oracle9i JDeveloper tool version 9.0.5, which it introduced at JavaOne last week in San Francisco.

The Java camp also scored a victory last week when Hewlett-Packard and Dell Computer said they would ship technology for running Java on the desktop in upcoming PCs and laptop computers.