Everything we have spoken of so far has been related to the executable or runtime environment. Specialist tools are required to take advantage of this environment. It is possible to hand craft the assemblies and descriptors required to build a SOA Suite application but it is not a practical proposition. Fortunately Oracle provide JDeveloper free of charge to allow developers to build SOA Suite applications.
JDeveloper is actually a separate tool but it has been developed in conjunction with SOA Suite so that virtually all facilities of SOA Suite are accessible through JDeveloper. The one exception to this is the Oracle Service Bus which in the current release does not have support in JDeveloper but instead has a different tool, WebLogic Workspace Studio. Although JDeveloper started life as a Java development tool, many users now never touch the Java side of JDeveloper, doing all their work in the SOA Suite components.
JDeveloper may be characterized as a model based, wizard driven development environment. Re-entrant wizards are used to guide the construction of many artifacts of the SOA Suite, including adapters and transformation.
JDeveloper has a consistent view that the code is also the model, so that graphical views are always in synch with the underlying code. It is possible to exercise some functionality of SOA Suite using the Eclipse platform, but to get full value out of SOA Suite it is really necessary to use JDeveloper. However, the Eclipse platform does provide the basis for the Service Bus designer, the Workspace Studio. There are some aspects of development which may be supported in both tools but easier in one than the other; for example, Workspace Studio provides a better WSDL editor than JDeveloper.