JDeveloper
JDeveloper is a free IDE from Oracle it offers features for development in Java, XML, SQL and PL/SQL, HTML, JavaScript, BPEL, PHP and more. JDeveloper covers the full development lifecycle from design through coding, debugging, optimization and profiling to deploying. JDeveloper became free in 2005.
JDeveloper simplifies application development by focusing on providing a visual and declarative approach to application development in addition to advance coding environment. In addition Oracle JDeveloper integrates with the Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) - an end-to-end J2EE based framework that further simplifies application development.
Oracle JDeveloper is the main development platform for Oracle's tools. The core IDE exposes an API that other teams in Oracle use to build extensions to JDeveloper. BPEL, Portal, BI and other components of the Oracle platform all build their design time tool on top of JDeveloper.
Features
JDeveloper comes in three editions; each one offers more features on top of the others, and all of them are free. A high level list of features includes:
Java Edition
- Java SE 5 Support
- Code Editor
- Code Navigation
- Refactoring
- Swing
- Unit Testing
- Version Control
- Audit & Metrics
- Debugging
- Profiling
- Ant Support
- XML Support
- Open API & Extensions
- User Assistance
J2EE Edition
- JSP
- Struts
- JSF
- EJB
- TopLink
- Web Services
- UML
- Database Development
- Deployment & Management
Studio Edition
- ADF Databinding
- ADF Faces
- ADF Mobile
- ADF Business Components
- ADF Swing
- ADF Deployment
History
The first version of JDeveloper (1998) was based on a licensing of the JBuilder product from Borland. JDeveloper went through a complete rewrite to be based on Java, for its 9i (2001) version. The 10g version (9.0.5) showcased the first release of the revamped Oracle ADF. In 2006, still under the 10g tag, Oracle released version 10.1.3 - the latest major release. More details here: [1]
Visual and Declarative
While the JDeveloper code editor offers a rich set of coding features and helpful utilities the thing that makes JDeveloper stand out when compared with coding tools like Eclipse and IntelliJ is the visual utilties that provide a different view of the code as well as the declarative dialogs helping in creation of J2EE components.
For example JDeveloper provides a visual WYSIWYG editor for HTML, JSP, JSF, and Swing. The visual editor allows developers to modify the layout and properties of components visually and the code is changed for them. Any changes in the code will be immediately reflected in the visual view. Similar experience is provided for both JSF and Struts page flows.
Declarative features enable you for example to generate EJBs or POJO based on existing tables in databases. JDeveloper automates the creation of J2EE artifacts - for example with a simple click you can turn a java class into a web service and JDeveloper will generate the WSDL and all the required JAX-RPC components.