The company says its Oracle JDeveloper 10g tool, formerly priced at $995, will be available for free. Meanwhile, the Wicket team debuts Wicket 1.0, a Java Web development tool for building reusable Web components.Oracle on Monday will announce a deeper commitment to free development and involvement in open-source projects, while other open-source efforts also spring forth.
Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle Corp. will announce that it will be making its core Java development tool, Oracle JDeveloper 10g, available for free. The Java and Web services development tool has up to now cost $995 per user, the company said.
Meanwhile, also in conjunction with this weeks JavaOne conference in San Francisco, Oracle will announce that it is leading a JSF (JavaServer Faces) tooling project in the Eclipse Foundation open-source community and also will join the Apache Foundations MyFaces project as a core contributor.
And as Oracle makes its announcements, the team driving the development of the open-source Wicket Java Web Framework plans to introduce the Wicket 1.0 Java development tool, also at the conference.
Rick Schultz, vice president of Oracle Fusion Middleware, said Oracles goal is to help simplify the development of SOAs (service-oriented architectures) and focus on the standards and key elements that make a difference there.
Schultz said the key elements in building SOAs are the user interface, business logic and the ability to orchestrate services. The key technologies Oracle is promoting in each of these areas are JSF, EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) 3.0, and BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), respectively.
"Were making our complete SOA development environment, Oracle JDeveloper 10g, available for free," Schultz said. This will enable developers to use and compare the Oracle tool to other leading Java development tools, such as Borland Software Corp.s JBuilder.
"By dropping the price tag, we feel well get further adoption of JDeveloper," Schultz said.
Meanwhile, Oracle has submitted a proposal to lead the JSF tooling project for Eclipse, which will build on the companys EJB 3.0 project announced in April. And Oracle plans to make the functionality that comes out of the JSF and EJB 3.0 Eclipse projects available in future versions of Oracle JDeveloper, Schultz said.
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Oracles involvement in MyFaces, an effort to deliver an open-source implementation of JSF, is to "make sure there is a de facto standard implementation of JSF," Schultz said. "MyFaces in Apache is well set up for broad-based adoption and will be key to the broader success of JSF," he said.
Moreover, MyFaces will be key to the Oracle ADF (Application Development Framework), the companys JSF solution, and Oracle ADF will be compatible with the MyFaces runtime.
Meanwhile, the Wicket team will announce Wicket 1.0, a Java Web development tool for building reusable Web components.
The technology enables developers to build dynamic Web pages from both a design and a code domain. Wicket components are extensible within the Java language. And Web pages are kept in XHTML pages that can be edited with standard Web tools, the team said.
The Wicket open-source project began in spring 2004, led by Jonathan Locke, an original member of the JFC (Java Foundation Classes) Swing development team at Sun Microsystems Inc.
"Wicket development is so much easier," Kees Mastenbroek, project leader at Deventer, Netherlands-based Topicus BV, said in a statement. "Wicket has dramatically improved our ability to create large-scale Web applications with complex user interfaces. The ability to reuse every component in Wicket, whether it is a page, a panel or an input field, led to significant productivity gains, and allows us to handle complexity better than ever before."
Miko Matsumura, a former Java evangelist at Sun and currently a vice president at Infravio Inc., said in a statement, "Wicket is very clean, elegant and component-oriented." Matsumura also characterized Wicket as "ready for prime-time."
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