(November 15, 2002) - Demonstrating its ongoing commitment to the establishment of open industry standards, Oracle Corp has submitted to the Java Community Process (JCP) a new API specification designed to enable the creation of standards-based extensions that are fully interoperable with any Java IDE. In addition to reducing the time and cost of development, this new API is expected to increase the breadth of available tools and technologies that better suit the specific development needs of Java technology developers, third-parties, and the open source community. Sun Microsystems, Macromedia, and JetBrains are the first to support Oracle's submission of JSR 198 - The Standard Extension API for Integrated Development Environments.

"Defining a standard way to extend any Java development environment with new functionality will speed time to innovation in the application development industry," said Mark Driver of industry analyst firm Gartner. "Now third party tool vendors and the open source community can easily integrate their offerings with the major vendors' development tools."

Today, developers and third-parties are required to write separate add-ins for their tools to work with each Java tool vendors' IDE. The establishment of this new API as a standard will enable developers to write Java tool extensions once that can seamlessly integrate with any other standards-based Java IDE. The new JSR API submitted by Oracle is based on 100 percent Java technology standards, including Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT) and Swing for creating graphical user interface (GUI) application components, such as buttons and dialogs.