MyEclipse Blue Edition 9.0 Offers RAD Alternative

June 7, 2011 Alex Woodie

Power Systems Java developers who are looking for an alternative to IBM‘s pricey Rational Application Developer (RAD) may want to take a look at the latest release of the MyEclipse Blue IDE from Genuitec. In May, Genuitec delivered the ninth version of MyEclipse, which supports HTML5, Java EE 6, and other technologies.

Genuitec has been developing Java IDEs since it was founded in 1997. In 2003 it launched MyEclipse Blue, its most feature-rich IDE. MyEclipse Blue replicates many of the Java-development features in IBM’s RAD, including support for deployment of Java applications to IBM i and DB2/400. But, at $160 per developer seat per year, it does so at a fraction of the cost of a RAD license, which costs several thousand dollars.

Genuitec is portraying MyEclipse version 9 as a “smarter IDE,” owing to its built-in application lifecycle management (ALM) layer. The new release supports the latest developer technologies, including HTML5, Java EE6, JPA 2.0, JSF 2.0, Eclipselink 2.1, and Apache‘s OpenJPA 2.0 release. Deployment is supported on IBM’s WebSphere Application Server 6.1, 7 and 8 (beta), and WebSphere Portal Server 7.0. MyEclipse Blue Edition also supports Ajax, Visual SQL, Spring, Hibernate, and Maven.

MyEclipse Blue Edition 9.0 is based on MyEclipse 9.0, which was released in March. The Blue Edition adds support for WebSphere and offers some other capabilities that are important in IBM environments.

The version 9.0 release of MyEclipse Blue also offers support for DB2 on Windows and Linux through “seamless database integration connectors.” IBM i shops have also used MyEclipse Blue against DB2/400 (via JDBC), and will be able to continue to do so. In fact, Genuitec and Databorough, a provider of application analysis tools for IBM i customers, formed a partnership in late 2008 specifically to target IBM i shops.

For more information, see www.myeclipseide.com.