At my current customer I have SQLDeveloper open the whole day, and regularly I come back to it to query my throttle-table to see if my requests have been picked up. But regularly my database connection have been broken because of being idle. Probably because of a nasty firewall between my remote development desktop and the database.

Googling on it I found an article of That Jeff Smith on busy connections. That blog is really one to follow. Feed it to your Feedly if your a recent SQL Developer user.

But in my search I found the 'keepAlive-4' extension for SQL Developer 4. Download the KeepAlive zip, go to Help->Check for Updates in SQLDeveloper and install it via the 'Install From Local File' option. Then look for the Keep Alive icon in the toolbar:
Click on it and enter a check frequency, of at least 60 seconds. I try 180 seconds.

You can disable it by clicking it again. Another click and it asks for a new interval again.