Oracle is putting the finishing touches to its JDeveloper 10g integrated development environment (IDE) for developing and deploying Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications and web services. The 10g release is due to ship on 26 March.

Oracle said the complexity of developing J2EE applications should be reduced thanks to the system's new Application Development Framework (ADF).

Oracle hopes that ADF will hook developers with the promise of faster application development thanks to ready-to-use components that would otherwise have to be developed by hand.

Ted Farrell, architect and director of strategy for Oracle's Application Development Tools, said, "The idea behind ADF is to get a set of well-written routines that run on top of the application server to give developers an easier ride when they're developing applications."

Many organisations will have discovered that building a J2EE application is easy, but building a quality J2EE application is not. Oracle hopes to address this.

"We're trying to provide the good features but trying to do it in a standard way - so that we don't go down the proprietary road, which is very tempting for all of us vendors," Farrell added.

In theory there are two types of developers - visual and code developers - and normally an IDE provides environments for one or the other, but Oracle has introduced so-called "technology scopes" that can handle both and will show only menu options for the specific technologies chosen for each project in either environment.

Although any J2EE-compliant application server should be able to run Java applications created using Oracle's ADF, firms will be tied to JDeveloper for application development.

Bola Rotibi, senior analyst for software development at research firm Ovum, said, "[JDeveloper] 10g is a realisation of the strategy Oracle has been talking about for the past 18 months and it's a good tool, in line with other tools on the market. However, the problem is at the minute Oracle doesn't have market share - even though it says it does."