Netbeans 5.5 and Jdeveloper 10.1.3.1 which one ?
Both Jdeveloper and Netbeans that i am talking about them are in beta and developer preview stage.
Netbeans as an Opensource IDE has its own fast growing user community.

Netbeans 5.5 beta 2 let features include :

• develop and deploy on tomcat / Glassfish and Jboss out of the box.
• As core features it has many code generation facilitis which can help to bootstrap an application ,it has code generation for CMPs , session facades ,ws client stub....
• Having an almost first class profiler , first class J2me development pack
• New c/c++ development pack
• good support for SVN and CVS
• very good Swing designer
• developer collaboration module
• Heavy support of SUN by giving the source codes for some of its extra pack

which Made NetBeans a good choice for developers.

One of the packs that donated by sun· is Enterprise pack , Enterprise pack features in brief are as follow :

• UML 2 compliant modeler
• visual BPEL
• visual WSDL designer
• xml visual tools for xml schema declaration ...
• facilities to develop web service and apply security on them.

Sun announced that it will add Java Studio creator to NetBeans Stack as another package.
having Creator can attract many users to Netbeans as it provide a rich set of feature for web application developers.

but what about Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3.1?
some times ago Oracle announced that it will let developers to use JBeveloper for free . so Jdeveloper and Netbeans from one point of view are the same ,You will not pay any penny for them.
Oracle really boosts JDeveloper in recent years which made JDeveloper a choice for j2ee application developers
JDeveloper Editor has changed to a very powerful editor with a good refactoring support.
opposite to Netbeans which you need to download several package to gain most of its feature you will not need to download any extra package to make use of jdeveloper as it is appropriated.
·

• Oracle have much more code generation falsities that Netbeans .
• visual ESB modeling allows you to assemble you ESB component visually (its ESB is not JBI compliant)
• visual WSDL designer
• visual xml development tools
• good swing designer and data binding using oracle ADF
• good JSF / Struts support , indeed Jdeveloper JSF support with its ADF faces is brilliant.
• WYSIWYG for HTML and jsp pages with support of third party jsf libraries like Myfaces.
• first class database development facilities ( for oracle database mostly).
• Only you can use oracle server suite as development server there is no support for other application servers.
• No support for c/c++ development (AFAIK).
• built-in profiler
• very powerful web page generation which can bootstrap a data driven web page design.
• UML modeler (1.4 compliant)
• very rich set of facilities for Web service development
• ...

I think JDeveloper (for now) is ahead of NetBeans as it provide much more facilities for developers , but for later version we can not tell anything because NetBeans people are unpredictable , as they prove their credibility by release of NetBeans 5.

What you have read is my opinion which might be biased. we never can say that one IDE is 100% better than another , it is just context oriented and the users view point. but one thing is completely obvious that JDeveloper and NetBeans both are going to provide rich facilities for SOA. NetBeans by means of· Enterprise pack and using glassfish with integrated BPMS from intalio and· what it has acquired from seebyond.
and oracle with its SOA suite and JDeveloper , both are going to make choice harder for developers.

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