By Peter Coffee, PC Magazine
April 23, 2002

Oracle isn't exactly David to Microsoft's Goliath, but that's the image that might come to mind when the talk is about development tools. Oracle JDeveloper was until recently a repackaged tweak of Borland JBuilder—not a bad starting point for a tool that was strong and agile but hardly a statement of industry leadership.

That situation changes with this spring's release of Oracle9i JDeveloper, a product unto itself that can even teach the new Microsoft Visual Studio .NET a humbling lesson or two. Available for free download to developers who aren't building commercial or production code (others need to talk with Oracle about licensing fees), JDeveloper lives up to the standard set by JBuilder for responsive, two-way linkage between the various views of a project in progress.

In fact, our tests of the winter Release Candidate code found JDeveloper better in this respect than Microsoft's newly launched flagship development environment. For example, the forms designer in Visual Studio .NET generates code with warnings not to attempt manual editing and does not respond at all to source code edits until it next becomes the foreground tool. But JDeveloper's visual GUI designer responded dynamically and consistently to our manual source code modifications.

Developers are concerned about platform lock-in, and JDeveloper addresses this concern with a commitment to nonproprietary standards: The version we tested came ready to deploy on Apache SOAP as well as Oracle9i Application Server. XML is the lingua franca of the world of JDevelopment, and WSDL (www.w3.org/TR/wsdl) is the grammar.

We found JDeveloper comparable to JBuilder or Visual Studio .NET in its auto-completion aids during manual coding, with the added edge of JDeveloper's CodeCoach tool, which monitored an application session and gave us suggestions for improving our code structure. If you like JDeveloper's suggested fix, a mouse click gets it done. For a pure Java application, JDeveloper on our Microsoft Windows 2000 workstation exhibited few nonstandard behaviors to betray its nonnative status, and we enjoyed the ease of deployment that comes with that packaging. The development environment was very easy to arrange to our taste, and the supplied tutorial project will give the Java novice a vigorous jump start into the world of enterprise applications.

Both Oracle9i and Microsoft .NET provide Internet infrastructures. However, Oracle9i is built with widely adopted and highly productive J2EE and XML industry standards whereas Microsoft .NET is built with proprietary Microsoft standard.

More information on the review can be found here.