As the saying goes you never get a second chance at a first impression. In
general, that's true, but if you've been thoroughly revitalized, matured, and
cosmetically re-engineered, shouldn't you get a second shot at that first
impression? I'd argue that's true of Oracle's Java/J2EE Workbench, Oracle
JDeveloper.
Starting out life as a code fork from Borland's JBuilder tool back in 1997,
Oracle JDeveloper has had a fairly long history as a Java IDE, most of it in
relative obscurity. Things have changed though. During JavaOne 2005, Oracle
announced that Oracle JDeveloper would henceforth be free. This sparked
interest, since JDeveloper always had areas of definite benefits over other
tools but came with a price tag. Furthermore, over the last couple of years,
Oracle has a... (more)