I feel that Oracle should abandon JDeveloper and start creating eclipse plugins for there products. Oracle has created the JDeveloper IDE to provide developers a way to work with Oracle’s many different enterprise level products like Toplink, OC4J application server, Oracle Databases, and the SOA suite of applications.

JDeveloper is a ok tool to use, especially if you are using all Oracle products. But throw a new technology in the mix and JDeveloper will really show its shortcomings. Oracle should take a note from JBoss and just start developing there tools to work in the Eclipse IDE. Since Eclipse is more of a application framework that allows users to install plugins to preform different tools, this application framework would be a great place for Oracle to developer to top notch plugins for developer to use.

It would really nice to have a common tool, like Eclipse, with many different plugins to work in many different environments. It also would be nice if Oracle would stop to control the world with so many different products. They have so many different things they are working on and trying to maintain, that they seem to always come up a little short. Taking the JDeveloper product off of there plate would provide Oracle with more time to concentrate on other things.

I know that Oracle will never leave the JDeveloper IDE behind, but they should at least start developing some cool plugins for the Eclipse IDE that would allow Eclipse users to more easily user the Oracle suite of products. Also there are so many better tools developed for Eclipse that is is not even fair. The majority of open source tools now have very nice plugins for Eclipse. There is the Spring IDE, JPA Tools, and a majority of Server Technologies.

Eclipse also has other technologies you can program easily with like C++, Ruby, Java, ect. It really is a great tool. The only thing I would like to see done better is the dependency management of library’s needed to get the plugins installed and better plugin management.