Comments on: News from OOW 2008: JDeveloper 11g and ADF 11g go production – TopLink 11g available today

By: Jean-Marc Desvaux

Jean-Marc Desvaux — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 08:39:12 +0000

Interesting discussion.
If I can add my word as a non ADF expert, i would say it’s clear we have two approaches here when talking ADF :
one from a Java developer expert developing for customers and with sometimes a technical choice driven by the customer choice and the second is an approach from another Java developer expert but speaking more from a customer perspective.
As a company CIO, this difference means a lot to me specially if you want to own,master and sustain what’s running in your company. That’s why I understand the choice of Florin’s customer for JDev 11g.
Apart from rich functionality and RAD, what Oracle has to deliver with ADF is sustainability of apps built with the framework by insuring ease of migration from version to version.
ADF 11g will be a great release, the mentioned CodeShare initiatives combines with an “ADF Methodology” would be great stuff for ADF developers.

By: Peter Lorenzen

Peter Lorenzen — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:00:13 +0000

Thank you Lucas!

By: Lucas Jellema

Lucas Jellema — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:28:10 +0000

Hi Peter,. On your question with regard to SQL Developer: I asked Sue Harper, product manager for SQL Developer what would be shipping in JDeveloper 11g and she confirmed that JDeveloper 11g production will ship with SQL Developer 1.5.2 (one patch release later than the current shipping release of SQL Developer itself.

By: florin marcus

florin marcus — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:48:16 +0000

I am located in Romania, unfortunately not close enough to your location (Holland if i am not mistaken).

Florin

By: Lucas Jellema

Lucas Jellema — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:32:50 +0000

Sounds great. And I am sure interested in your real life experience with ADF 11g. Where in the world are you located – close enough for us to meet in person?

By: florin marcus

florin marcus — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:19:07 +0000

Lucas, thanks for your answer, I really appreciate it.
We switched from Open Source technologies to Oracle because that was one of our customer decision. The choice of using JDeveloper 11g was a customer decision also. JDeveloper 11 and ADF seems a very bold goal, therefore risky. I hope that Oracle manages to deliver something meaningful outside Oracle world. Lets resume this conversation in December, after 2 months of working with production ready release.

Florin

By: Lucas Jellema

Lucas Jellema — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:43:04 +0000

Peter, I do not exactly know the status of SQL Developer for the 11g Production release. I would expect a slightly older than the very latest SQL Developer to be in there, but I cannot be sure. I will try to ask one of the JDeveloper product management team here at OOW. And perhaps they may read this comment and come in to answer it themselves. I will get back to you that one.

By: Lucas Jellema

Lucas Jellema — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:41:22 +0000

Hi Florin, Thanks for your comment. It is very interesting how you state all the frameworks you mention have made you much more productive than the ADF stack – and yet you have switched to the ADF stack. That does not seem a very good idea then. Or can it be that you have a different type of job to do now and you cannot really compare – the apples and oranges thing? You are right that in theory you should not have to be aware of the XML because of the IDE and the wizards and you are right too that sometimes it is unavoidable to dabble in XML like for example the faces-config.xml file for JSF. One of the benefits we get from the XML – apart from having the wizards and editors and a lot of other IDE support like impact analysis that most annotation driven environments do not seem to give you – is the ability to perform run-time manipulation of the meta-data either before or after it gets loaded in. That for example makes it possible to apply organization or user customizations in the case of SaaS style applications.
One of the undercurrents running through JavaOne 2008 by the way was the notion of the ‘annotation hell’ – using one or two annotations in a class definition is much easier than having to set up yet another external XML configuration file, especially if you do not have an IDE that helps you edit the file or shields you from making typos. However, adding dozens or even many more of annotations to your classes quickly render you in their own little version of hell – readability, maintainability, ability to perform bulk changes on those settings or get some across the board reporting are all pretty much out of the window.

I am afraid I apparently was not clear enough in my previous writing: I did not intend for you to understand that the developers that are actually developing JDeveloper – the product development team itself – has people with a lack of Java skills (duh) but I tried to describe how JDeveloper is being used by 1000s of developers in Oracle’s other product development teams – especially the horizontal and industry specific ERP applications – who may not all have a strong background in Java (or even in programming for that matter). One of the challenges for the team that creates JDeveloper is deliver a tool that on the one hand allows people like yourself to do all standard Java and JEE programming, either using fancy IDE support or just doing your thing in source code, and at the same time help those with fewer skills and experience to be productive too. And you will find many teams where developers with a limited skill set are turning in their fair share of work, with the more advanced stuff beyond the IDE and the wizards capabilities being picked up by more senior developers, like yourself.

I think by the way that it is quite brave to pick up such an early Technology Preview to start building an entirely new application. There is a world of difference between TP3 and the pending production release – and obviously what you have done is certainly not what Oracle (officially) wanted you to do with the early pre-beta. Apart from the pre-production issues that I am sure you have run into, are you satisfied with the application that the team is producing? Is ADF giving you what expected it to and what made you decide to start using it back in February despite the fact that it was not even beta at the time?

Lucas

By: florin marcus

florin marcus — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:48:56 +0000

Lucas, I am fully working from February with JDeveloper 11g. I have 6 years of java open source background (JBoss Seam, Struts, Struts2, Tapestry, Hibernate, Spring ). All open source technologies or frameworks I have mentioned here made me and my team much more productive than the ADF stack. One mistake is this huge XML configuration that can prove overkill . When others are running from ‘XML HELL’ (in favor of annotations), Oracle embraced it. In theory, XML configuration won’t be a problem since you always use the IDE and wizards. But in practice it won’t be always the case, you have to understand what is happening under the hood when you are working with production applications.
You mentioned those not experienced with java developers that work on JDeveloper. Now you confirmed me what I was suspected for a long time: some of the developers on ADF and JDeveloper don’t have the minimum Java knowledge required. Example: handing Exceptions. Anyone who worked with JDeveloper 11g for some time knows what I am talking about.

I hope that the Production Release will prove that all my bad experience was because of the Technical Release status of the JDeveloper.

Florin

By: Peter Lorenzen

Peter Lorenzen — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:59:27 +0000

Hi Lucas,

Would you know if SQL Developer will be available as a plug-in in the 1 October JDeveloper release?

Regards Peter