Oracle JDeveloper is Oracle's main development tool for Java based SOA applications. It provides a development environment for Java, Database,XML, SOA and WebCenter applications.
The focus of the IDE is on providing a visual and declarative development approach to standards based development.
JDeveloper itself is free of charge and can run on any platform that supports JVM including windows, linux, max and unix.

More on the JDeveloper page on OTN: http://oracle.com/technology/products/jdev

Oracle ADF (Oracle Application Development Framework) is a Java EE based development framework that aims to simplify application development. It is based on the MVC architecture and offers functionality that simplify various tasks and infrastructure that is needed for building Java EE applications. ADF offers a choice of technologies that can be used to build each of the layers of the application. In addition to using standard Java EE technologies such as JSF, JSP, Swing, JPA and EJB, ADF also offers sub-frameworks to handle specific layers.

These include:

• ADF Business Components (middle tier business services components that handle database interaction)
• ADF Faces (JSF UI components for web applications providing rich functionality)
• ADF Swing (Swing UI components for Java client applications)
• ADF Model (A binding layer that provides declarative drag and drop based binding of various backend components to various UI technologies. For example you can take and EJB, POJO, ADF BC or Web Service and bind it to JSP, JSF and Swing UIs with a simple drag and drop operation.)

You can mix and match ADF technologies depending on your architectural requirements, ie. you can build an ADF application using either ADF Faces or ADF Swing or a combination of these.

More on the ADF page on OTN: http://oracle.com/technology/products/adf


Timeline of JDeveloper take from OOW 2007 presentation "Oracle Fusion Middleware Past, Present and Future"