Next week's JavaOne show is expected to inspire a lot of talk about service-oriented architectures (SOA). And Oracle plans to be right in the middle of it all by giving away a JDeveloper 10g kit free to all developers.
The move is both surprising and unsurprising. Free software tools have been all the rage in the development community, thanks to open source creations, such as the utilities forged under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation.
But free tools from major money-making vendors is a different story. Oracle is looking to capitalize on the attractive freeware model to jumpstart interest in its own development tools as an alternative to offerings from rivals IBM, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Borland.
Rick Schultz, vice president of product marketing for Oracle Fusion Middleware, said that Oracle is giving away the development environment to stimulate interest in the platform. JDeveloper 10g normally sets corporations back $995 per seat.
Developers can use JDeveloper 10g to build Web services, which ensure communication among applications regardless of the differences in the infrastructure and protocols and make up an important component of distributed computing models like SOA.
