Last week, Sun and Oracle announced a 20+ year period of more intense cooperation. According to this link http://www.sun.com/2006-0111/feature/index.html Sun and Oracle will forcus on these three main areas:
- Collaboration on Java technology, with Oracle’s continued commitment to Java technology for the next 10 years
- Oracle’s endorsement of the NetBeans IDE, which will fuel
innovation through open source software and community-based development - Offering the leading real-world performance of Oracle databases and
business applications on Sun’s hot x64 processor-based servers,
multicore UltraSPARC processor-based servers, and storage systems
This has lead to some speculation within AMIS. On January 12 we had one of our Knowledge Center evenings and one of the discussions was about the future of JDeveloper. The above announcement may indicate that JDeveloper will cease to exist in the end. However, Thomas Kurian says on this OTN article
"We are currently leading three different groups
within the Eclipse Foundation for Java and BPEL technologies, and we
are actively involved in integrating our Fusion Middleware products
with Eclipse. Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse. We certainly
think Sun’s NetBeans initiative is important in the marketplace, and
we’re watching it very closely. But as of right now, Oracle is focused
on JDeveloper and Eclipse and we have no plans to adopt either NetBeans
or any of its technology. Any statements to the contrary by anyone else
in the industry are not true."
So, I guess JDeveloper will still be a point of focus for Oracle. So, would anyone care to speculate on what this close cooperation would mean to NetBeans?
![Unittesting PL/SQL (ODTUG 2006)]({"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"http:\/\/seattletimes.nwsource.com\/ABPub\/2012\/08\/02\/2018836700.jpg","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"0"} "Unittesting PL/SQL (ODTUG 2006)")
Steve Muench is also Setting the Record Straight on Oracle and NetBeans on his blog.
The quote “”We certainly think Sun’s NetBeans initiative is important in the marketplace, and we’re watching it very closely. But as of right now, Oracle is focused on JDeveloper and Eclipse and we have no plans to adopt either NetBeans or any of its technology. Any statements to the contrary by anyone else in the industry are not true,” in the OTN-article is quite clear.
Note that this is also discussed in the Infoworld article Oracle’s NetBeans commitment in question.
It doesn’t seem like it means much of anything at all…
From my point of view it certainly doesn’t feel like JDeveloper development is coming to an end. Over the last month or so, we’ve been going full throttle on design work and the beginnings of development for the 11.0 (aka Fusion) release.
There are some very cool things in the pipeline for this release… I can honestly say that it really feels like we’re innovating in the IDE space in a way that really hasn’t happened before (it always felt like we were playing catch up). We’re also hiring (check out http://irecruitment.oracle.com), which is surely a sign that JDeveloper isn’t about to be canned any time soon…
Last but not least, the core of JDeveloper is fast becoming the de-facto standard within Oracle as the base platform for Java based desktop applications. Raptor is the first product based on this platform to be released in the wild, and the success of Raptor has helped us a great deal to encourage other products to move over to our platform. Expect to see more desktop applications from Oracle based on the JDeveloper core in the not too distant future…
All in all (and hopefully without seeming like too much of a spin doctor), JDeveloper’s future seems very rosy at this point.