Thomas Kurian, Senior VP development, was up next in the general session room ready to announce some interesting stuff. The setting was really nice with an Oracle red background image on the huge LCD screen. (anybody has a picture of this ?) Thomas Kurian announced, as expected, that the JDeveloper IDE environment is now made freely available for all java developers. I must say, that if you want to do some serious JSF development you should check it out! It runs also on Mac, so I should really give it a twirl and see if I can develop as sexy JSF/AJAX enabled web apps like the demo's. Oracle is also contributing their EJB 3.0 implementation as an open-source Reference Implementation for the EJB 3.0 JCP specification. Next to that, Oracle will release eclipse plugins for EJB 3.0, JSF and BPEL development, it seems Oracle is betting on two horses here.

Other nice demo's shown was the BPEL 'designer' (see also Edwin's talk from last years JavaPolis), secured Web Services using WS-Policy using Oracle's Web Services Manager. Another nice looking demo was a DHTML/AJAX, probably JSF, enabled rich application client demonstrating business activity management. I would love to know what burden this has on the network with all of these XML Http requests !?

To be honest, from what I've seen today, Oracle is a step further than some vendors (to name one, BEA Systems) in the area of JSF, BPEL and especially in the EJB 3 space. And this is not something Hugo asked me to type

It was funny to hear that Thomas also mentioned that Oracle allows you to work with other open-source frameworks like Spring, Tapestry, Struts etc. so buzz-word compliant.

Anyway, great JSF demonstrations and I personally believe at the end, with all of these free tools and plugins, the Java Development Community is the big WINNER !

Cool stuff,

Stephan