JDeveloper 11g preview

The (Oracle) Java community is currently buzzing because the first JDeveloper 11g preview is available for download at the OTN JDeveloper 11g page. I’ll give you a short introduction on my first experiences. Installation is, as always, a breeze. Download and unzip. I started JDeveloper, and although it warns me that it is not certified for Java 6, it seems to work like a charm. When you start JDeveloper, the first thing to pop-up is the update manager, with updates for JUnit and for the SQL Developer Migration Workbench (whatever that is for?). The user interface has changed and is a bit slicker (with the new default theme: Fusion Blue (what’s in a name)) but looks very familiar. But when you start working you’ll notice lot’s of small changes, e.g. the application navigator only shows the current application, which you can select with a dropdown (figure 1) or the style that wizard use (figure 2) or rounded input boxes, etc.

Off course, I started to define the subversion connection to properly store my code. Versioning is now a direct menu option and after I created a new application (see below), I could quite easily add it to Subversion with the use of a wizard.

The new features I was most interested in are off course the new ADF Faces Rich Clients components. So I created a new application, a new web project, I selected some JSF and ADF libraries (JSP Runtime, ADF Common Runtime, ADF Faces Runtime 1.2, JSF 1.2, JSTL 1.2) and then created my first jsf page. The component panel has slightly changed and now organizes the components into separate groups like, Common, Layout and Operations. Most components I’m already familiar with but a few new ones appeared : Popup, Quick Query, Status Indicator, Train, Xml Content and a Panel Accordion (spelling according to JDeveloper), but the Panel Page has disappeared.

Let’s start simple and drop an ‘Input Number Slider’ on the page. Don’t forget to give it a value or you’ll get a nullpointer. In the editor it looks like this :

That’s it. Now run it and it shows beautiful in all the browsers (unfortunately I was not able to capture the changed cursor and the popup text saying ‘increase’):

After the demo last year at the ODTUG conference we are finally able to create our own ADF Rich Client application :-). I would like to show you more, but that will wait for a proper evaluation. One thing to mention is that under the hoods the ADF Faces components are based on the Trinidad components, that Oracle donated to the Open Source community.

For now I got a short but good impression of JDeveloper 11g. It looks more attractive that the previous version, it’s handier in many places, but still provides us with the same user experience. I haven’t look at the support for EJB 3.0, JPA, JSF templates, the other JSF libraries like ICE and the other new features. I can’t wait for the final version. I hope it will have Maven support.

Resources

1. OTN JDeveloper 11g page
2. Steve Muench’s JDeveloper/ADF 11g Technical Preview Tips and Tricks