Reviews : Review: M7 NitroX 2.0 J2EE IDE :

Review: M7 NitroX 2.0 J2EE IDE

by Drew Falkman

It's ironic that J2EE is pushing its fifth version soon and it's still all but impossible to find a good integrated development environment (IDE). OK, yes, there are a few proprietary ones—but doesn't that go against the whole notion of using an "open" platform? I dare say so. I stumbled upon M7's NitroX recently, and I had a good feeling about it. They were saying all the right things, so I had to take it for a test ride.

Introduction

Those of us who haven't committed to a proprietary platform like BEA or WebSphere end up using two different IDEs for the different parts of our applications (I generally use Eclipse with plug-ins for class development and Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Jabberers Pages). This works OK. And I mean that with a soft "O" and a soft "K," because when it gets down to it, the relationship between all these objects is really only visible in one location: my brain. Sound familiar?

Requirements, Installation, and Setup

Three installation options are available:

• Standalone: Installs along with Eclipse 3.0.
• Eclipse Add-on: Allows you to run NitroX with Eclipse 2.1 or 3.0.
• IBM WebSphere Add-on: Allows you to run NitroX with IBM WSSD 5.1.x or WSAD 5.1.x.

NitroX supports debugging and deployment on the following:

• Apache Jakarta Tomcat 5.0.x, 4.1.x and 4.0.x
• BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 and 7.0
• Caucho Resin 3.0
• IBM WebSphere 5.x
• JBoss 4.0.x and 3.2.x

The next step was to configure an application. I imported an existing application and I also created a new one. Both were easy and responded as predicted.

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