Oracle recently announced that JDevloper 10g will now be free. A free
JDeveloper I think is a far bigger announcement than what it might
seem.

JDeveloper has been around for many years, but now might finally be the
time when JDeveloper gets the mass following it
deserves.

My reasons for being so positive on JDeveloper and believing that a free JDeveloper will have a big impact on the Java IDE market, are:

• JDeveloper is far more powerful than any other free offering. NetBeans and Eclipse are great but they are nowhere near JDeveloper as regards the features and range of tools available. JDeveloper can be compared with WSAD and JBuilder but not with NetBeans or Eclipse.
• Other expensive IDE vendors will have an even tougher time selling their IDE. So other companies that make money from middleware, databases, etc but not much from IDEs, might also make their IDE free. WSAD looks like a good candidate.
• JDeveloper’s full, functional and unlimited trial has been available for a long time. So a lot of developers are already good at using JDeveloper. They just did not use it on projects becasue it was not free. So I expect JDeveloper adoption to grow at an unexpected pace.
• ADF is a powerful and mature framework which was being pulled down because you could not use ADF unless you had a JDeveloper license. I believe ADF will still be part of JDeveloper. Oracle being a part of the MyFaces JSF implementation should also mean that ADF will not only continue to improve but also offer good JSF capabilities. However ADF is still not open source and that I think will continue to work against its widespread adoption.
  (Update: Free JDeveloper no longer includes a license to deploy Oracle ADF applications to non-Oracle application servers. You need an Oracle ADF license if you plan to deploy to a Web container like Apache Tomcat. Refer to the Pricing FAQ )
• The Oracle media machine will fire a lot of jargon to make JDeveloper look even bigger than what it is.

I expect JDeveloper to propel itself into a lot of developer machines and to have a huge impact on the IDE market.

Disclosure: I authored the book Oracle JDeveloper 10g: Empowering J2EE development. So my views are a bit biased

Reference:
>> JDeveloper @ OTN
>> Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Application Development Framework Pricing FAQ
>> Oracle Strengthens Commitment to Java Developers with Free Development Tool and Open Source Projects

Related:
>> Eclipse vs NetBeans

Written by Content Team on June 29, 2005      Print