JBoss Romances Juliet

Open source firm JBoss Group Tuesday aided its efforts to spread its a Java-compatible application server software with a new partnership designed to make developers’ lives less stressful.

The Atlanta-based company said its customers can now take advantage of Luxembourg-based Infotectonica’s powerful Juliet code comprehension tool.

Juliet is a Java tool for reading, browsing, searching and analyzing source code featuring an easy-to-understand graphical interface. The tool, now in its third revision, competes with the likes of Cygnus Source-Navigator, Source Insight and IBM’s open source “eclipse project.”

Infotectonica boasts that Juliet is more comprehensive and gives developers access to rich information about the code, including where and how types, methods and fields are used (instantiated, called, overridden, written, read, etc.) — without having to load an IDE . With Juliet in place, JBoss says Java developers can also easily ask complex questions about their code, such as “Where are subclasses of this abstract type instantiated? Where are the methods in this package’s classes used? Who writes to the fields in this type?” Juliet makes it easier than ever for developers to review or re-use code or simply get up to speed on large code bases.

“With Juliet, it all boils down to not wasting time,” Infotectonica CEO Carlo Walentiny said in a statement. “Developers rely on Juliet for just-in-time code comprehension, so they can use their time to build reliable applications on top of JBoss.”

The companies are offering a free trial download of the product bundle at both < a href=http://infotectonica.com/juliet/download >Infotectonica’s site as well as at JBoss’s.

Following in the footsteps of the Linux operating system and Apache Web server, analysts say JBoss is the third major open source project to achieve significant adoption in enterprise IT. The company boasts its Web application server software has already been downloaded 2 million times at an estimated rate of 250,000 times per month and is believed to be the most widely used application server, even above IBM or BEA, according to some industry publications.

Recently, JBoss took the wraps of the developer edition of JBoss 4.0, which is the company’s first attempt at an aspect-oriented programming (AOP) framework.

Editor’s note: See what JBoss founder and CEO Marc Fleury has to say about the direction of his company in this exclusive interview.