Buck Turgidson said:
I am curious to know if there are open source equivalents to jDeveloper or
WL Workshop that would not incur a licensing fee.
If you mean "a good IDE", you're setting yourself up for a "holy war".
Personally, I think Eclipse is a good open source IDE, but it is entirely
too complex for a beginner (even if it makes developement easier).
For a beginner, BlueJ is said to be a better IDE. However, it is only free
to use for non-commercial use (i.e. no open source).
And personally, I have good beginners experience with gvim. Nowadays I use
IntelliJ, which is not free.