Genuitec, which says it can do for 30 bucks a year what IBM Rational and BEA Workshop charge $12k-$15k for, is about to roll out the finished version of its MyEclipse 5.0, an Eclipse-based J2EE IDE.

The company figures it's saved developers a cumulative $250 million since its widgetry first came to market three years ago. The most it charges is $50 a year for its Professional kit, which adds more functionality than its Standard issue.

Genuitec claims 283,000 registered users, though not all of them are paying customers, in 9,000 companies, 80%-85% of them Global 1000, a lot of their names are listed on the Genuitec web site. And the company is profitable, according to CEO Maher Masri, though how profitable is unclear but it expects to have a million users by the end of next year.

Although in the open source business, all Genuitec developers work for the company and it takes no GPL or LGPL code. It distributes under the Apache license.

Anyway, MyEclipse 5.0 is the first IDE compatible with Eclipse 3.2 and its companion Callisto projects, good for work on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Mostly it's used on Windows.

The new release also integrates the Matisse4MyEclipse Swing UI designer directly into MyEclipse so it's easier to build sophisticated graphical user interfaces on applications. MyEclipse 5.0 also graduates Web Service support to first-class status.

Masri claims 45% of the developers exposed to a MyEclipse download buy in the first 25 days, 90% in the first 250 days.

(This story appeared originally in Client Server News.)