Meanwhile, Sun said there have been more than 8 million downloads of the NetBeans IDE (integrated development environment) to date. The NetBeans Enterprise Pack 5.5 Software Preview includes all of the capabilities of the NetBeans 5.0 IDE, plus the technologies previously only available in the Sun Java Studio Enterprise Software.

This preview bundle gives developers early access to tools that enable Java EE 5 Platform development and creation of SOA applications, including UML (Unified Modeling Language) tools; visual design tools for SOA architects; and the Java EE 5 Platform SDK Preview, including the Sun Java System Application Server PE 9 beta, Sun said.

"We realized that the big challenge was to greatly simplify the Java EE development model so that developers could use the power of Java EE, but avoid the complexity and the boilerplate" which was an issue in Java 2 Enterprise Edition 1.4, the current version of Java EE, Hamilton said in his blog. "This was a key motivation behind a major Ease-of-Development initiative that we ran across J2SE 5.0 and Java EE 5."

Hamilton said the Java EE 5 goals included: "Eliminate common boilerplate...; Focus in on 'Plain Old Java Objects' (POJOs)...; Improve defaults, so that the 90 percent common cases just work; Eliminate the need for deployment descriptors (but still allow people to add them later); and Emphasize 'truth-in-source-code' so that source code clearly specifies what is going on..."

Java development gets the Web 2.0 treatment. Read more here.

In addition, Hamilton said, "One of the key early decisions was to move to a more declarative programming model. Rather than requiring that people programmatically code up behavior, we wanted to allow people to specify behavior in some kind of declarative style, so that tools and libraries could recognize your intent and take care of the programmatic actions for you. But at the same time we wanted to get away from complex XML side files or obscure naming patterns as the way of specifying behavior. We wanted to allow both simple declarative coding and also return to an emphasis on truth-in-source-code."

The official Java EE 5 beta bits are available here.

Also on Feb. 21, Sun announced its new Sun DSP (Developer Service Plans) program to help developers shorten the application development learning cycle, increase productivity and take advantage of Sun's software development tools when building enterprise-class applications for Solaris 10, Java technology and the Java Enterprise System, the company said.

DSP delivers product support and updates, training, and programming advice that reduces time and risk through the entire application life cycle, from development through deployment, Sun officials said.

This article was originally published on eWEEK.com.