M7 Aquisition, NitroX and Web Application Development
Dev2Dev Editor's Blog |
September 29, 2005 7:54 PM
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Comments (1)
As you may have heard from reading the press
release or some of our
blogs,
BEA has just acquired M7. I tracked
down an M7 employee (BEA employee now ;-) ), to try and get the scoop
on what they do, and what this means to developers. I spoke to Carlos
Chang, a senior product manager at M7.
d2d: Carlos, what do you guys do?
M7: We are an Eclipse-based tools company based in Cupertino, CA.
Our current tool set, NitroX, embraces Web application development.
d2d: NitroX is a set of Eclipse plug-ins, right?
M7: We actually have a product family: NitroX Studio, NitroX JSP
IDE, NitroX Struts IDE and NitroX JSF IDE. Many folks out there are
already using our JSP editor.
d2d: These are obviously all focused on Web application
development
M7: Yes—that's our primary focus. We have awesome support for JSP,
JSF and Struts, and we've just added Hibernate support too.
d2d: No Spring?
M7: I suspect that's coming!
d2d: What differentiates your plug-ins from other available
plug-ins that do similar sorts of things?
M7: I think one of the most important differentiating factors is
AppXRay and the way we support Web application development across all
of the layers.
d2d: All of the layers?
M7: Yes. So a Web application these days has some Web framework,
such as Struts, and persistence framework, say Hibernate. Mixed in with
these you have your views, say JSP or JSF, and then a hoard of
configuration files. For example, tags, property files, configuration
files for Struts and Hibernate, etc. What we do is provide a holistic
view of these artifacts with AppXRay.
So what AppXRay does is sit in the background monitoring these
artifacts, and making sure that everything is consistent. For example,
if you're editing a configuration file, it will make sure that a
resource file or JSP page that you point to actually exists and vice
versa. It's an incrementally maintained database of all artifacts and
their relationships.
It's almost impossible to make contextual or syntactical errors
because of AppXRay. The key here is that we use this information to tie
all the layers together, to tie all the artifacts together, and to
provide a very tight and cohesive set of tooling around these
technologies. It's not just about Java—it's about the frameworks that
you use to build your applications on top of Java—all integrated into
Eclipse.
d2d: So I guess that kind of technology strengthens your other
offerings, such as the JSP editor.
M7: Yes. The JSF editor too. We've got some great JSF support,
including custom component management, graphical tooling, navigation
tooling, configuration file tooling, you name it.
d2d: How does NitroX live alongside other tools such as WTP for
example?
M7: That's not a problem at all. There is a philosophy of plug-in
development in Eclipse—and we try to be "good plug-in citizens."
There are a couple of things, but they're minor. For example, you
sometimes have to tell Eclipse which of two JSP editors you want to
use. But we actually use some of the components of the WTP too—for
example the CSS, WSDL and JavaScript editor.
d2d: What does this mean to BEA users? What about WebLogic
Workshop 9.0 that's in production?
M7: NitroX supports many of the open source frameworks that BEA has
embraced as part of its blended approach. So NitroX provides a lot of
the tooling behind these things. The Eclipse efforts in WebLogic
Workshop 9.0 provide a very different toolset—supporting the SOA
thrust, Web services, integration with other WebLogic and AquaLogic
products, etc. We're coming from two different directions, and our
toolsets complement each other. We have a very extensible architecture
in NitroX—and foresee these toolsets merging. At the same time, we
have a toolset that supports other application servers too. For
example, the NitroX suite supports WebSphere, Tomcat, Jetty, JBoss, Resin and
WebLogic—that probably won't change.
d2d: So these tools don't replace Workshop in anyway. Instead,
they enhance them.
M7: Right. IMHO, the future for Workshop and NitroX customers looks
very bright.
d2d: Can you give me some key features of your IDE that you think
we should be aware of?
M7:
- What people appreciate about our environment is that it doesn't
get in the way.
- We always keep performance of the IDE in mind; we want the IDE
experience to enhance your productivity.
- A fantastic UI, very tight integrated.
- The AppXRay is amazing—code checking, validation, across the
layers.
d2d: At the end of our discussion, Carlos gave me a demo. I love
the Hibernate stuff. Reverse engineer from the databases; easily
establish the physical model; easily map this to an entity model
exposing the relationships between classes, etc. Nice.
Carlos also pointed me to some great documentation on the M7
Web site (lots of pretty pictures!).
Technorati Tags: beaworld, eclipse
Comments
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Yes, please stick to your philosophie: NO VENDOR LOCKIN. Thanks (I am both a good BEA partner and M7 customer! and I hope that the M7 will change the way BEA looks at the ISV market. Stay open. Don't lock in. Provide standard based development and easy management).
Posted by: MarkyGoldstein on October 1, 2005 at 9:48 AM
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