The Java tools market is in flux, with the recent acquisitions of CodeGear and BEA Systems altering the landscape, leaving developers with fewer independent tools choices.

Oracle bought BEA Systems for US$8.5 billion. Meanwhile, CodeGear, which had been on the market for more than 18 months, finally was bought by Embarcadero for US$23 million, a figure much lower than a reported original asking price of $150 million. CodeGear's offerings now will be paired with Embarcadero's database development tools. Compounding the clouded scene is Compuware's decision to discontinue its OptimalJ Java development environment.

BEA's acquisition raises questions about the BEA Workshop Java toolset. "I know that they're going to certainly sustain the product, but I don't really have any visibility into any improvements that they're going to make," said Bill Roth, a former BEA unit executive in the Workshop products group. (Oracle declined to speak on the issue.)

Roth gave a thumbs-up to Embarcadero's CodeGear buy. "I actually like what Embarcadero is doing, and I'm really pleased to see how they're taking in and adapting CodeGear. I think it's a great move," said Roth. Embarcadero is merging best-of-breed database tools and coding tools, he said.

Fewer vendors, fewer choices

"We're definitely seeing a consolidation," said Maher Masri, president of Genuitec, which offers the MyEclipse IDE, a Java tool based on the open source Eclipse platform.

IBM, Oracle, Genuitec, and CodeGear now account for 95 per cent of the commercial tools market in the Java space, Masri said. But Oracle and IBM have entire infrastructure stacks, so developers risk vendor lock-in with these choices, he said. "The flexibility of being able to move in and out of one-vendor-provided solutions is becoming less and less possible."

IBM Rational's Ashok Reddy, director of offering management, did acknowledge that IBM tools are optimized to work with IBM software. But he said that developers can use tools such as the Rational Software Architect and Jazz platform with other platforms. "They'll work with almost anything out there," he said.

The exact impact of the CodeGear acquisition, meanwhile, remains to be seen. "It's not quite clear in terms of what direction they're going," Masri said. Embarcadero could end up offering a technology stack like other companies, he said.

The CodeGear acquisition "is about creating an empire of tools," said Greg Keller, vice president of product management. He sees the consolidation of tools into fewer vendors as a positive thing:

"If you use IDEs like [CodeGear's] JBuilder or Eclipse, we now can offer the developer an integrated set of tools to ensure their productivity from the Java code straight through to the relational database code," Keller said.