Review: Oracle JDeveloper 10g (9.0.5) Preview
by Drew Falkman
Introduction
Let me be frank, I have never invested more time than necessary
on Oracle's J2EE tools. It's not that I have anything against
them, per se, it's just that there are a lot of other choices
out there. But again and again, I keep seeing JDeveloper appear
on my radar as the IDE of choice for alot of developers. Given
the amount of competition in this space, Borland JBuilder, the
open source Eclipse, and so forth, I figured it was time to take
a serious look.
I found that JDeveloper 10g is more than just a Java
IDE. In addition to Java development, you can use JDeveloper to
create user interfaces, HTML, Java Swing and XML-based; create
and manage databases, develop Web Services and work with XML and
XML schemas and all of these tasks can be done using fairly
intuitive, visual-based drag-and-drop tools.
Setup and Installation
Overall, setup on Windows XP was smooth. The current preview
release is a simple ZIP file that can be downloaded and
extracted. A JVM location must be added to the config file, then
one can simply execute the IDE. Note that this release will not
register itself in Windows or add a shortcut to the Start Menu.
IDE Overview
The main interface of JDeveloper is quite similar to most Java
editors. Figure 1 shows the IDE opened to a basic Web
Application(using Oracle's ADF MVC framework - more on that
later).
In addition to the usual project information and workspace,
JDeveloper also includes the visual tools on the right side of
the frame. In Figure 1, this is the Struts Page Flow information
which includes actions, pages and so forth. Depending on what
you are working on, the options here will change (this is called
the Component Palette). These items can be dragged into the
workspace allowing you to create WYSIWYG application components
and connect them. This is true for Web Services, XML schemas,
database tables, or whatever else you are editing through the
IDE.
JDeveloper also includes a number of development tools, too
many to list actually, but the main ones include:
- Integrated Debugging
- Refactoring
- Advanced Searching Capabilities
- Versioning/Team Development Tools
- Import Tools for EJB
- WebDAV Support
- JavaDoc Generation
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