Some companies call it “early access”, others “pre-release”, or even “milestones”, but Oracle likes to call it Technology Preview. Not a beta yet, but very usable.
Oracle released JDeveloper 11g – Technology Preview. So it’s not the real thing yet.
It’s JEE 5 compatible, has a ton of new features, and is also faster to boot.
Personally I don’t like what they did to the property inspector, or the introduction of harmonicas in toolbars for that matter. Apart from some fancy try-outs, the GUI did not change.
The rest of it I still got to try. There is still on visual aid when designing Swing like the Matisse designer has.