Oracle has released Oracle JDeveloper 10g free of charge to the Java developer community and has announced the company's participation in two key open source projects relating to JavaServer Faces (JSF).

Oracle JDeveloper, a mature full-featured development tool that includes a comprehensive Java and web services integrated development environment, was previously priced at $995 named user plus. The product includes easy-to-use features for building SOA applications based on its rich functionality for web services, BPEL process flows, UML modelling and Portlets.

Making Oracle JDeveloper available for free enables developers to evaluate the product against competing offerings purely on breadth and depth of functionality rather than price. The move marks Oracle's increased dedication to its developer tools and allows the company to compete on an even playing field while simultaneously promoting its standards-compliant technology stack to the developer community.

JavaServer Faces is a web application framework designed to enable developers to more easily build user interfaces for enterprise Java applications. It enables developers to reuse user interface components, connect them to an application data source and link client-generated events to server-side event handlers. Developers do not need to worry about managing the user interface on the server and can instead focus on their application code. Oracle is proposing to spearhead a JSF tooling project within the Eclipse Foundation open source community, which is working to develop highly integrated tools. Oracle will also join the Apache MyFaces project as a core contributor. This project is building an Open Source Implementation of the JavaServer Faces Framework.

Oracle is the only company to offer developers such a broad, free choice of development tools, components and runtime platforms for JSF. The company has submitted a proposal to lead the JSF tooling for Eclipse project. This project builds upon Oracle's Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 tooling project announced in April and makes the JSF framework available to an even larger base of developers. Additionally, the functionality provided by the JSF and EJB 3.0 Eclipse projects will be available to developers in Oracle JDeveloper.

Oracle's participation in the MyFaces community is also intended to drive adoption of JSF. As a member of the Apache community, Oracle will contribute developer resources and components to the project. In future, MyFaces will be a central part of Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle's JSF offering. Oracle ADF Faces components will be compatible with the MyFaces runtime.

One of the keys to the success of the J2EE platform will be making it easy to develop enterprise Java applications. By providing Oracle JDeveloper for free and supporting JavaServer Faces, Oracle is accelerating the development of composite applications and the adoption of the J2EE platform. When leveraged by Oracle JDeveloper 10g's integrated development environment, JSF enables developers to rapidly build and deploy rich composite applications.

"By making Oracle JDeveloper free, Oracle is showing its commitment to removing all obstacles, including price, to the adoption of Oracle JDeveloper," said Christophe Job, vice president of development at Oracle. "In addition by contributing to MyFaces and offering to lead the Eclipse JSF project, Oracle is supporting the latest technology standards and is making them accessible to all developers regardless of their choice of IDE."

Where next?

• Download Oracle JDeveloper 10g now
• Sun's JavaServer Faces FAQ
• Eclipse
• Apache MyFaces