Development technology gains improved J2EE, third-party app server support Sun Microsystems on Monday is upgrading its open source NetBeans development technology and remains undaunted by the rival Eclipse platform.Available now at netbeans.org, the new NetBeans 4.1 Java IDE offers improvements in J2EE and mobile-application support as well as easier development.“The two big thrusts in 4.1 have been about J2EE development and mobility — and, really, J2EE has been the core of it,” Sun Vice President James Gosling said. Also new in NetBeans 4.1 is automated deployment to the BEA Systems WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and JBoss Java application servers, Sun officials said. Entity beans, which represent persistent business objects in applications, are enabled in Version 4.1 as well.NetBeans has had 4.6 million downloads since its inception five years ago, with one-quarter of those downloads occurring in the past six months. Sun officials say they are firm in supporting NetBeans over the higher-profile Eclipse open-source platform.Sun “is fully committed to the NetBeans platform for tools,” according to Timothy Cramer, who is the director of NetBeans in the Java and Developer Tools Group at Sun. Software Development