Sun pulled James Gosling out in front of the media to talk about NetBeans. The conversation seemed to get away from the road map, and onto the politics of why Sun isn't joining Eclipse. James came out stating that NetBeans is definitely here to stay, and that he welcomes "bio diversity". He said that JSR 198 will be there to help integration between the various tools.

Java Guru Speaks Out On Interoperable Tools Efforts

NetBeans Roadmap Has Many Avenues

While a standard for java tools is important and neccessary,
I'm missing a more basic API: A Rich Client Container.

As there containers for EJBs, Servlets, Connectors, ..., a Rich Client Container
would free the developer from managing menues, toolbars, workspaces, threading issues. The Rich Client Container would also control the complete life-cycle
of a Plug-In (Eclipse-speak) or Module (NetBeans-speak).

A Rich Client container would be the perfect platform to develop any kind
of Rich Client, either stand-alone or a Tier-1 client for a J2EE app server.
(The current application client is not well support, e.g. no WebStart support).

Yes, both Eclipse and NetBeans are doing something in that are,
but does it mean that this IDE specific conflict also explodes
into (Rich) GUI programming?

I also do see the need for a Rich Client container.

The container should embed a Rich Client into the J2EE world, and give you
features like:

o built-in business delegate pattern

o connection with J2EE security framework: user login, disabling of
widgets and menue entries if (!isCallerInRole(String roleName))

o automatic filling of forms with business data objects and automatic
writing back of (only if changed) data

o controller framework to check data entered on forms (e.g. is there a
family name entered, is age > 18) and to automatically position the cursor
on a missing or wrong entry

o some kind of business workflow, i.e. user has to follow a given sequence
of forms

I once was looking for a client container, the nearest I found were

o http://www.eclipsepowered.org/RCP/
o http://sourceforge.net/projects/atrisframework

connection with J2EE security framework: user login, disabling of widgets and menue entries if (!isCallerInRole(String roleName))

Proper security requires authorization not occur in a client program. This is especially true of web services, where a malicious user can readily swap in a Python client or such without the rest of the distributed system noticing.

Uh, Visual Basic + SOAP?