Sun To Show Project Rave Updates At Sun Network Show

Also at Sun Network, the company will demonstrate how Project Rave will integrate with a new developer toolset for Sun's Project Orion, Orion Developer, said Joe Keller, vice president of marketing for Java Web services and tools for Sun.

At the conference, which kicks off Sept. 16 in San Francisco, Sun will demonstrate how developers can take applications built using the Project Rave tool and integrate them into Orion Developer to move applications built on a smaller scale to the enterprise level, Keller said.

Through this interoperability between the two environments, developers can "move from the assembled toolset into one where you can do more coding," Keller said.

Sun plans to debut Orion Developer at Sun Network as a set of licenses, tools, APIs, blueprints and services for developers to build applications on Sun's Project Orion, which bundles a host of Java-based middleware into the Solaris operating system, Keller said. Orion Developer is based on Sun ONE Studio, he added.

As CRN first reported, Sun, Santa Clara, Calif., also will unveil its first version of Project Orion at the conference in two weeks.

Project Rave, first unveiled at JavaOne in San Francisco in June, is Sun's plan to go up against Microsoft, IBM Rational, BEA Systems and other providers of tools aimed at corporate-level developers who prefer to visually model applications rather than do hard-core coding.

The tool will support Java standards such as Java Server Faces, JDBC-Rowset and several Java APIs for XML to allow developers to rapidly build Web- and database-driven Java applications.

Keller said Project Rave will provide a purer visual tool than its competitors because Sun's project is aimed squarely at developers that want to assemble applications visually without having to write a lot of code.

"Rave is targeted very much at being visual first and [allowing developers to] add a little bit of code," Keller said, adding that many RAD tools on the market require a substantial amount of coding and only have a small visual element.

Sun, however, has "taken great pains to make sure [Project Rave] is targeted at people who don't want to start with code first," Keller said.