I have been a NetBeans and JDeveloper user for many years. I have used Eclipse on and off but can’t say that I have ever adopted Eclipse as such. Recently downloaded the new NetBeans 6.1 beta and was impressed. I already had the latest JDeveloper and Eclipse on my machine.

Rich Unger is currently on the NetBeans Governance Board and has been a contributor to NetBeans for several years. He was honored at this year’s NetBeans Software Day for his valuable contribution to the NetBeans platform.

In this interview Rich talks about NetBeans 5.0, NetBeans Profiler and the changing Java IDE market. He shares his views on plugin development for the NetBeans platform and on Eclipse. He also elaborates on why he thinks the field is wide open for client frameworks for desktop java apps and how it could come down to Swing vs SWT.

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.