Reviews : Oracle JDeveloper 10g (9.0.5) :

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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