Oracle shelves Sedona toolset

Oracle's (ORCL) planned next-generation development tool, put on ice earlier this year, has been officially killed off, according to an Oracle product manager.

Oracle officials had said earlier this summer that the project was on hold, but would go forward. Now the project has been scrapped, and the company plans to use certain technologies developed for the Sedona project, such as an object database design tool, in its Developer/2000 and Designer/2000 tools, said Steve Illingworth, senior product marketing manager at Oracle.

Oracle will also detail later this month a new Java and JavaBeans development tool project, code-named Valhalla, built using technology licensed from Borland International, according to sources close to the company.

Valhalla will target Java and CORBA application development. That's where Sedona fell short, said company officials.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said in June that Sedona was on hold due to infighting in the company's development tool division over the technologies it supported. The tool was to include an object repository and the ability to generate object-oriented applications. But its reliance on Basic language scripting and Microsoft's DCOM as a cross-platform architecture clashed with Oracle's widescale adoption of Java and CORBA technologies in recent months.

"We developed Sedona and then Java came on like a storm," said Illingworth. "And we have to support CORBA."

Oracle was also reluctant to launch a new tool that would further confuse its development tool lineup and compete with its flagship Developer/2000 and Designer/2000 toolsets. "We don't have Java built into Sedona. It would be silly for us, silly for us to release a tool that competes with our mainstream toolset," Ellison said in June.

Valhalla, a new member of the Developer/Designer lineup, is built atop Borland's JBuilder technology. While few details are available on the new tool, it clearly will be positioned as a Java-based rapid application development tool for Oracle's user base. Sohaib Abbasi, senior vice president of Oracle's tools division, will detail the company's Java road map at the Oracle Open World conference later this month in Los Angeles, according to the company.

Oracle will include some of the technology developed for the Sedona project into Designer/Developer, starting with version 2.0 of Designer, which the company posted today to its Web site.

Designer/2000 version 2.0, an upgrade to Oracle's application development and modeling tool, adds support for Oracle's latest database server, Oracle 8, and can generate Visual Basic, JavaScript, or Oracle PL SQL code.

The revamped Designer will also work with other maker's databases, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase SQL Server, and IBM DB2.

Designer/2000 version 2.0 shipment is planned for the first quarter of next year, said Illingworth. Pricing has not been set.