Oracle Designer Web Assistant was incorporated into the base Designer product as the Repository Object Browser (ROB). Since it is now part of the product, there is no separate license required, though you may need an Oracle HTTP server license. ROB runs as a Web PL/SQL application, so you need to be using either Oracle HTTP Server with the mod_plsql module or Oracle RDBMS 10g Release 2 or later with the Embedded PL/SQL Gateway (EPG) configured and running. There is some additional configuration to be done to use ROB. A set of images needs to be copied from your Designer client’s Oracle Home to the web server, and you have to set up a Database Access Descriptor (DAD) in your mod_plsql configuration file (dads.conf) or use DBMS_EPG to set up a DAD for EPG. There is documentation with Designer to explain how to configure ROB.

As for being an active project – well, it is as active a project as Designer itself is. Which is to say, not very.

Credit: John Flack, on the ODTUG-JAVA-L mailing list