I'm a fan of Sun and use many of their products. As the types of applications I want to write get more sophisticated I find middleware out there that helps write them. Lately I've been finding that Sun doesn't have some of these middleware products. For example, lately I've been reading about BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), BPM (Business Process Management), BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). Oracle and IBM have their offerings in this area. Apparantly Sun aquired these types products from a company it purchased in 2005 but very little information is available about it. Are these products free like the rest of Sun Java Enterprise System? Where can I download it from? The links on their site make it seem these products are not yet available to download and you can sign up to be told when they will be available.

Also I noticed that Sun doesn't have a JVM for Pocket PC. IBM does. I'm not sure how NetBeans' mobility pack compares to IBM WebSphere's mobile developer tools.

I'm starting to realize a few things about Sun:

• The products Sun does have are excellent commercial grade quality, and over the last year or two have been made free.
• Sun has aquired many of it's products by purchasing other companies.
• Sun is presently in the process of completely rewriting many of their systems from scratch such as their portal server, identity server, directory server, etc... They've already completed the rewrite of their application server (glassfish/sun application server).
• Sun doesn't offer all of the things companies such as IBM and Oracle have
• Sun's NetBeans IDE developers chose not to fully implement the BPMN standard in their visual orchestration designer because of BPEL compatibily issues. The symbols on screen will be the BPMN symbols, but the properties and back end stuff will be BPEL. I don't know if this is good or bad, but I got the impression that the BPMN standard was a very good step forward.

I'm always reading about how a new eclipse plugin was released and why they chose to target eclipse. I think Eclipse is very commercial. If you want to use eclipse to do anything but create POJO's, then you need plugins. From what I can tell, the most complete solutions are IBM WebSphere, BEA Workshop, and Oracle's solution. They are very very good. I used MyEclipse on a J2EE 1.4 system and was really turned off by it's EJB support. I think they focused on hibernate/spring etc.. which is not the direction I chose, knowing about EJB 3.0's pending release.

Sun's NetBeans IDE made a bad name for itself years ago and left a bad taste in people's mouth. Many people thought of it as a toy, not suitable for commercial enterprise apps. I think that the releases of NetBeans 5.0 and especially 5.5 have made it comparable to WebSphere Studio, though I'm sure it doesn't have everything WebSphere has.

I'm sticking with NetBeans 5.5 and Sun Application Server because they do everything I want end-to-end at no cost. There are a few java editor features that I miss from Eclipse but those are being addressed right now for the upcoming 6.0 release.

Something else I dislike is how there are religious wars within the Java world. Which IDE do you use? EJB or Hibernate/Spring? Struts, tapestry, or JSF? Tomcat or an application server? Linux or Windows? Etc etc... I hope the choices I'm making today are the right choices and won't lead to missed opportunities in the future because of religious wars. From what I can tell, the most widely mentioned skills are WebSphere, Oracle and Struts :/