Continuing with our Java tooling theme, we come to a couple of developments from Oracle on IDEs. The higher-profile one is the release of the Oracle Enterprise Pack, a free set of plug-ins for Eclipse. There isn't anything terribly new here, and the motivation is fairly transparent; as the Inquirer dryly puts it, "Oracle is hoping that by giving developers who use Eclipse an easier ride, more will incorporate its Fusion Middleware software into their applications."

The other IDE announcement is lower profile, and it involves the NetBeans platform Oracle inherited from Sun. Plans for the next point release of NetBeans, 6.10, have been announced; according to The H, NetBeans' "developers aim to unify the user experience when using different Java EE servers, especially WebLogic and Glassfish 3.1." That's a particularly interesting ambition, considering that NetBeans is much more closely associated with the free and open source Glassfish app server than it is with Oracle's enterprise offerings. It looks like Oracle is going to at least try the oft-suggested technique of using open source offerings as a gateway to paid products: perhaps if developers favorite IDE can help them make that transition, corporate dollars will follow?