Oracle to offer JDeveloper tool for free

From LinuxWorld
Oracle at the JavaOne conference in San Francisco next week will announce intentions to offer its JDeveloper 10g Java developer tool for free.

The tool, which has been priced at US$995 per developer seat, will be available on June 28. Future releases will also be free.

Describing the tool as an SOA development environment, Oracle's Rick Schultz, vice president of Oracle Fusion middleware, said JDeveloper features an IDE, UML-based modeling, a BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) process flow designer, and Web-services capabilities.

"This is quite a mature product that we've had for a number of years," Schultz said. "What we're announcing is we're dropping the price tag on that product and making it available to the Java community for free."

Rather than being a response to the momentum of the open source Eclipse Java IDE, Oracle's move with JDeveloper is intended to increase JDeveloper adoption and drive interest in the company's Fusion middleware line, Schultz said. Fusion features application server, portal, identity management and integration software.

Several companies of late, including BEA Systems, Macromedia, and Borland, have endorsed the Eclipse IDE. But Schultz said offering JDeveloper for free is not being done to counter Eclipse.

"We're actually doing some work in the Eclipse Foundation as well, but as far as JDeveloper, we really don't even view it as a direct competitor in a way to Eclipse in a sense that JDeveloper is much more than an IDE," he said.

Oracle's JDeveloper announcement was viewed by one analyst as a way to compete with the SAP NetWeaver middleware platform rather than as an Eclipse countermeasure. "I think it has more to do with trying to get Fusion out there," said Shawn Willett, principal analyst at Current Analysis. "They're in a big-stakes battle with SAP."

"[JDeveloper is] a pretty first-rate Java IDE. I think they just see this as a big advantage and getting it out there for free is going to help sell their middleware and help them in the battle against NetWeaver," Willett said.

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