It's ODD – the OTN Developer Depot -launched at OOW 2006

Yesterday during the Regional Directors for Oracle Fusion Middleware meeting I got a preview and demonstration of what is called the Oracle Developer Depot or odd for short as Peter Koletzke suggested. The ODD can be found on OTN – http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/java/oc4j/odd/index.html. It is a cool thing, this depot. It allows developers to very rapidly get code samples running on their local machine. Instead of downloading, extracting, configuring, compiling and deploying, just a simple download into the ODD application running in the local OC4J container will suffice.

Two things are required for this:

• the ODD application – perfectly normal J2EE application, packaged as an EAR that you download and deploy on the local OC4J instance.
• the Samples, packaged with some configuration files (XML documents) with meta-data interpreted by ODD during deployment of the sample

During installation of the sample on the local ODD environment, ODD may ask the user for installation parameters such as the database connection details, file directory to write the source code of the sample to or the names of users to be used in the application. Using these details, ODD can complete installation of the sample – including creating database objects, data sources in the application server etc. Next, we can run the sample application from within ODD running inside OC4J.

ODD makes it very easy to try out Sample Code: single click download, integrated parameter entry and run.

The ODD application allows you to
locate Java / Web services code samples or entire applications on a
remote repository
(the
“Depot”) and then download, deploy and run them
locally
in just a few clicks. In this preview release, the Depot is located on
Oracle’s Technology Network OTN where a catalog of applications is
ready for trial.

It seems that we can use the ODD application to run our own Samples as well: if we know how to provide the meta-data along with our own code, we should be able to upload those to ODD instances – there is no need for the sample to be downloaded from OTN. I will most definitely look at that option.

Over the next few months, all (?) samples on OTN will be converted to ODD format, to make them deployable on ODD.

Note that OTN provides RSS feeds for the samples, so we can easily keep track of newly released samples.