Bringing On the Bling With Genuitec’s IDE

Developers who find their development environment is not flashy enough could add a bit of sparkle with Genuitec’s Bling. Development tool providers Genuitec and Skyway Software teamed up to deliver the new tool known as MyEclipse Bling. However, the tool was named not so much for the slang term for flashy jewellery but to show that the name has its roots in a combination of two products, MyEclipse Blue Edition and MyEclipse for Spring. Genuitec says Blue plus Spring equals “Bling”.

However, the so-called “flash” in the new product comes in that it enables IBM’s Rational tools to adopt the Spring Framework and other Spring technologies fully in their WebSphere-deployable applications – all the way from inception through to production release, Genuitec said.

Rational Alternative For WebSphere

“This is a revolutionary product launch for Genuitec,” Todd Williams, Genuitec’s vice president of technology, said in a statement. “Our clients asked if we could support WebSphere the way they needed, they asked for the advanced tooling already available in MyEclipse for Spring, and asked if we would be willing to stay true to our low pricing models in a combined offering. We delivered on those requests by building a software development environment that is a smart alternative to Rational in price and ease of use, while providing industry-leading Spring development tools. It really does allow IBM shops to achieve the most value, and power, when using WebSphere.”

Bling integrates with WebSphere to deploy rich applications, while using Spring code-generation tools to create many project types simultaneously, Williams said. With Bling, developers can scaffold and bootstrap projects for iPhone, Adobe Flex, Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, JSF 2.0 and more, even readying projects for Google App Engine if desired.

MyEclipse Bling supports Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 6; HTML5; control of EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) and EAR (Enterprise Archive) deployments; Windows and Linux support; ICEFaces 2 and JPA 2.0 (Java Persistence API 2.0). The product also features Java editors, HTML editors, Inspectors, Maven, Hibernate, ALM (application lifecycle management) dashboards, project-team synchronisation and more.

Williams said it was solely Genuitec’s IBM customers that drove the effort to combine the company’s WebSphere tooling found in MyEclipse Blue with the advanced bootstrapping and auto-code generation from its Spring product line. He claimed that IBM Rational does not do a very good job on Spring support when deployed to WebSphere. “But our tools do a good job with enhancements on top of the SpringSource/VMware offerings, such as the Spring code auto generation and building apps for cloud, mobile and desktop environments, simultaneously, while deploying to WebSphere,” he said.

Subscriptions to MyEclipse Bling, MyEclipse, MyEclipse Pro, MyEclipse for Spring and MyEclipse Blue Editions are available annually. A feature list delineating the unique focus of each product is available.