Oracle's recent announcement that JDeveloper 10g will now be available free of cost, has sparked a lot of fresh interest in the IDE. In this interview we speak to someone who is in a great position to tell us more about JDeveloper and Oracle's other products for the Java community.

In this interview, Roel Stalman states that JDeveloper won't be moving to Eclipse or any other IDE platform. He also tells us what's planned for JDeveloper and Oracle Application Development Framework, and shares his thoughts on topics like EJB 3.0, AJAX, BPEL and JSF.

IndicThreads >> Hi Roel. Thanks for agreeing to this interview. Can you tell our readers a little more about yourself?

I'm the senior director of product management for Oracle's development tools, tools which include Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF. I've been with the JDeveloper team from the very beginning, in 1997, and during this time I have seen the product transformed from simple Java code editor to full-fledged J2EE and SOA development environment. I also supervise the development of Java-related training at Oracle.

"I've been with JDeveloper since 1997..."

I am also the proud father of a one year old boy called Nicholas and when I'm not busy with work or family, I enjoy playing poker or going out sailing on the San Francisco Bay.

IndicThreads >> After BEA and Borland, I am sure a lot of people are wondering if Oracle will be the next vendor to move its IDE over to Eclipse. Is JDeveloper likely to move to an IDE platform?

No, Oracle is, and has been, committed to making JDeveloper the best integrated development environment for Java and SOA developers. Because many developers do use Eclipse, we want to make it easy to deploy to Oracle Application Server from the Eclipse platform.

"JDeveloper will not move to Eclipse or any other IDE platform..."

Roel & Brian Fry - "Latest and Greatest with Oracle JDeveloper" - JavaOne 2005

For that reason, Oracle is now actively working on several Eclipse projects, including tooling for BPEL, for EJB 3.0, and for JavaServer Faces all of which is already available in JDeveloper.

IndicThreads >> It has become quite difficult to differentiate between IDEs because the feature lists look so similar. Each list full of all the latest buzzwords. What makes JDeveloper stand out from the crowd? How does it compare with other popular IDEs?

JDeveloper is the most comprehensive Java IDE available. Compare JDeveloper's feature set with the feature sets of other enterprise-level IDEs, such as IBM WebSphere Studio and Borland JBuilder, and you'll find that JDeveloper holds its own with a price tag that can't be beat. JDeveloper is free. Users will spend from $2000 to $4000 for the other enterprise IDEs.

"JDeveloper is the most comprehensive Java IDE available..."

Compare JDeveloper with other free IDEs and you'll find that JDeveloper offers more: a complete J2EE and SOA development environment, with design tools for EJB 3.0, JSF, BPEL, XML, and much more.

"The biggest differentiator of JDeveloper is the Oracle Application Development Framework..."

The biggest differentiator of JDeveloper, though, is the Oracle Application Development Framework. Oracle ADF enables developers to be more productive by offering a set of highly visual and declarative tools on top of a well-tuned framework. Oracle ADF makes Java development accessible to a much broader spectrum of developers by shielding them from the complexities of the platform and the APIs, while at the same time providing more experienced developers access to all the details and all the standard J2EE code and metadata.