Oracle Developer Cloud Service – cloud based agile development platform with tight integration across Oracle PaaS services

Something that you do not explicitly have to pay for may feel as having no value. The Developer Cloud Service is available free of additional charge with most Oracle PaaS services – and as such may suffer from a perceived lack of value. That would indeed be unfortunate – given the enormous strides made by the team behind this service, one of the oldest on the Oracle public cloud. DevCS has a clear goal: deliver better applications faster and cheaper – through agile development and DevOps. DevCS offers tools and integrations with target platforms that support increasing the agility for delivering features in products in a more frequent pattern – as well as increasing quality and productivity of professional software engineering activities in general.

DevCS incorporates source code control and version management, based on the industry standard Git system. It includes various tools for automated testing and QA – including Selenium, jUnit, Findbugs . Continuous integration and automated deployment are handled through

Hudson (somewhat unfortunately, since Jenkins is considered the community standard) with build automation done with Ant, Maven, Gradle, npm, Grunt, Bower and Gulp. Integrated deployment is offered to cloud services JCS & JCS-SX, DBaaS, SOA CS, ACCS and to the Container Cloud Service Docker Registry in the near future.

Upcoming is a browser based code editor – an IDE with codename Tailwind that integrates directly with the source code control system and offers compilation, formatting and code completion for various languages including Java, HTML5, JavaScript, JET, PL/SQL as well as debugging for Node.js and Java. `

Around the team collaboration and agile process, Dev CS does Issue & Task tracking (Jira-style), Agile management (user stories, product backlog, sprint board, burn down)

Wiki and Code Review (typically combined with merge of code and merge conflict resolution).

For communication, Dev CS integrates with Slack. DevCS can be configured with WebHooks that allow DevCS to notify external systems – such as Jira, Slack, HipChat – about events. Examples are a code commit, a build fail or a successful deployment.

DevCS integrates with desktop IDEs such as NetBeans, Eclipse and JDeveloper.

An upcoming feature in DevCS is support for integrated Compute VMs on which build jobs can be executed, to which deployments can be done and where tests can be performed as well as development work. These VMs can be based on provided templates for Oracle software installations – for example Node.js & Oracle Database Driver for Node, SOA Suite 12c, JDeveloper 11g. At a later moment, custom templates can be defined as used for these VMs.

Installing, configuring and integrating all components required for an agile software development including continuous integration takes substantial time, effort and knowledge and requires compute resources to be available. Setting such an environment up for a development team will easily take days if not weeks. Developer Cloud Service is ready to run; all that is required is the instantiation of a project and all tools and environments are provisioned in a few minutes’ time.

Download the AMIS OOW16 Highlights for an overview of announcements at OOW16.