Simon is a hands-on software architect who works within 
[Twitter] simonbrown: wondering whether Adobe's commercial approach to Flex Builder will limit adoption of Flex ... which will be a shame, because I quite like it
[Coding the Architecture] As mentioned before, we were speakers at, and community sponsors of the Software Architect 2008 conference (3rd-5th June 2008, London). This is the first dedicated software architecture conference that I've been to and the majority of the ...
Project Rave
During the keynote we saw a demo of Sun's new Project Rave. It's basically an IDE with which to build web applications based around the new JavaServer Faces API and components. I'm not sure whether it can be used to build other stuff but we did see them build a webapp. In fact we saw them build it twice because the Tomcat server threw out a 404 the first time! Poor guy doing the demo.
Anyway, if you've done any programming with a 4GL environment like PowerBuilder, VisualBasic, etc then this is pretty much the same, albeit for the web. You can drag and drop components on to the canvas (the web page) and hook them up with event listeners, datasources and web services. All in all a very quick way to build webapps and certainly aimed at the corporate developer market that Sun is trying to bring over to the Java world in an effort to significantly increase the developer community. Good demo, nice tool. We also saw Oracle's JDeveloper tool do something very similar yesterday so it seems as if Sun aren't the only company backing the whole quick webapp assembly game.
