I had JDeveloper lingering on my HD for a while, but never
gave it a serious run due to the licensing issues, because I constantly
work on a budget here.
But I rechecked the JSF part after the announcement, that one is
absolutely excellent.
The form designer is absolutely wonderful, it is sort
of an intermediate step between the studio creators
pure WYSIWYG apprach and plain code. It misses a split screen view
however like NitroX has. And also the split of taglibs in the taglib
part via a drop down is an easy solution, but not the best one, if you
have to access different taglibs constantly. After dropping in some
stuff I reverted back to handcoding and using the designer for stuff
which was not immediately known to me.
The best part of the IDE however is the Case integration, one of
the best I have seen so far.
They did a wonderful job with that part.
The problematic one, but from Oracles view, perfectly understandable,
given their business model,
is the database tier part, it threw immediately an exception once I
tried to drag an MSSQL table into the Database designer tools, due to
the different indexing mechanisms between oracle and mssql, also the
bindings for hibernate are lacking severerly, from what I could see, the
IDE supports basically, EJB1 EJB2, some binding stuff directly from
oracle and plain JDBC. For some strange kind of reasons most IDEs
currently shy away from JDO and Hibernate although Hibernate has become
some kind of defacto standard, where everybody currently copies the
concepts left and right (EJB3 for instance)
Anyway, I only can recommend, to give that stuff a testrun, it is
really the best enterprise IDE you can get for free or below 1000 USD so
far and a perfect example on how fast a complex Swing app really can be.
That is one thing which instantly impressed me, that UI is faster than
many native Windows UIs I have seen, although programmed in Swing,
really impressive job.
Werner
Brian Abbott wrote:
Extremely cool! + A free JSF IDE (AFAIK, There arent
any free graphicall/RAD IDE's supporting JSF).
I would be curious to know how oracle as a core
contributor will actually play out. Does that mean
they will dedicate one or more engineers to MyFaces
full time each and every day?!?! I mean... that's the
annual equivalent of a few hundred thousand dollars
plus opportunity cost for Oracle. But some of the best
Company to Developer P.R. money can buy! :)
Speaking of JSF enabled IDE's... Creator is nice. But,
I still dont understand why the java.sun.com site
continues pushing Netbeans? The day I downloaded and
tried Sun's Creator IDE, I think I saw about 4
Netbeans ads on the sun site on the way to the creator
download. Seems like their marketing people are
slightly confused.
