I went to a Sun developer briefing yesterday @ Sun's campus in Broomfield on what has become of Project Rave. Its renamed to JSCreator for one thing and is finally in EA. You can download a copy here.

My general reaction is very positive. The tool basically lets you build the simple apps very simply. So for example if you are a mom & pop shop that needs an app to do some custom business process you might have formerly bought VB for dummies and programmed a quick and dirty app. With JSCreator you can build a quick & dirty Java app with the relative ease of the VB app. Sun has built a tool that will allow you to easily attach controls on your pages to JDBC rowsets.

Some will have a headache with this approach, 'where are my toplink/hibernate/cocobase type collections' etc. My take is that this criticism is misplaced. Java needs a dev tool that is easy enough to build apps with that mom & pop can put together an application in 8 to 16 hrs that does what they need. You certainly are not going to build an app that scales to 25 million users with JSCreator but that is not the market the tool is aimed at anyway. Its aimed at the space that VB fills so well now. The one off app that is built not by the IT department but by the guy in finance who is tired of waiting on IT to build his simple app. This person runs off and buys a copy of VB (or even just whips something together in Excell) and spends a day or two hacking and the app is done. The app won't scale but it only has 3 users anyway so why worry about scale...

Ok so enough rambling, here are my notes from the presentation;

• Main focus is making java development easier - for simple stuff this looks like a winner in this category
• Its a full fledged IDE (basically netbeans on the back end with some minor to major mods, will resync later with 3.6 it sounds like)
• Visual design tool that keeps the visual design in the code instead of a third model. It appears that it can visually render any JSP and will allow you to edit that JSP. Overall this feature looks great in a demo but I want to play with it before I get to jazzed about it. Been burned too many times in the past with these claims :-)
• Does not expect to rule the whole development process - you can build the war related stuff (jsp's, servlets etc) in JSCreator and import them into another tool like Eclipse or NetBeans and do other stuff then go back to JSCreator. In the preso this point made it sound as if you had to jump back and forth but for simple apps you would not need to. I think the point was that you and use other tools to do the more complex stuff (backend stuff, webservices, persistence stuff like hibernate, etc).
• At some point in the near future (6 months to a year, I was thinking during the roadmap slide...) they will add rich client support as well as mobile stuff - this sounds really cool
• The team has been contemplating some type of integration with JDO or other object persistence mechanism, but for now works with jdbc rowsets.
• One very cool bit was that it works with web services. The demo was a bit canned, the webservice returned a block of html. But form the options in the properties page it appeared that you could do much more. I can't wait to mess with this feature!
• The idea behind simplification is to standardize all the SW dev on Java, not just the super starts in the IT staff but the normal person at a company that needs software but also has a life and does not want to sacrifice it to learn EJB's
• Will go FCS @ Java One
• Supports CSS 2
• maintains an ant build script on the back end
• In building the demo no part of any web.xml or faces-config.xml file was ever manually edited. This is a majorly cool thing. The tool has a very nice visual navigation editor that was just fantastic!

Over all I'm very impressed with what I've seen so far. I just finished down loading the EA so I'll be spending way to much time over the next few days messing with it. I'd love to hear about your experiences!

Matt Raible was there too and has posted a great review.