Eclipse gets Ajax Support
As I’ve mentioned before, tool support for Ajax was coming and sure enough, this week Genuitec LLC announced MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 4.1 that includes support for developing Ajax based applications with JavaScript editing and debugging. Its $49.95 per developer cost would be a real bargain just for the JavaScript piece but it also adds better UML capabilities and visual design tools for JSPs and JSF. Check out this Computerworld piece: Eclipse developers to get AJAX access.
Now, I’ve been a NetBeans guy since Ryan turned me on to the improvements made in 4.1 but I have to say: very cool stuff! I think it’s going to be immensely interesting to see what the next 6-12 months brings in the tool space. While we spent a fair amount of time in Foundations of Ajax discussing tools to ease the pain of JavaScript development, seeing the mainstream IDEs starting to have built in support is a huge step forward. In fairness to the guys at Sun, Tor Norbye has a great write-up about his Creator and Ajax demo at JavaOne and with Sun announcing that all its software will be free I can’t help but wonder what that will mean for the NetBeans world. Tor clarified what free meant on his blog and frankly, I’m going to have to try it out! And for those of you that are wondering what NetBeans is up to with JavaScript – Roumen pointed me to this link.
