JHeadstart for JDeveloper 10.1.2

The Oracle JHeadstart team is working hard on their ADF JHeadstart release for JDeveloper 10.1.2, to be released shortly – within a month according to the current plan. This release will have a much smaller JHeadstart runtime library as it will completely rely on the Oracle JDeveloper ADF runtime framework for all data-handling. That means that existing JHeadstart applications cannot be easily upgraded or migrated – unless they have been 100% generated. As a consequence, upgrading to ADF JHeadstart 10.1 and JDeveloper 10.1.2 may be somewhat complex.

However, even if an organization would decide NOT to use ADF, they still may – and probably do – want to use JDeveloper 10.1.2 rather than 9.0.5.2 because of the many (over 1000) bug-fixes. What these organizations need is a JHeadstart release that fits in with JDeveloper 10.1.2 and does not require use of ADF. In other words: a simple upgrade of JHeadstart 9.0.5.1 Design Time and Run Time to JDeveloper 10.1.2.

So far, the JHeadstart team has given no indication that they plan to produce such a release, even though presumably it is not a lot of work. The run time is probably exactly the same and the design time probably only needs some modifications in the interface with the JDeveloper plugin API and the BC4J Design Time API. I have posted a question on the OTN Forum for JHeadstart (see: http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jsp?forum=38&thread=282011&message=&tstart=0&trange=30875924#875924 or below).

I am looking forward to the response from the team and will let you know in this weblog.

Sandra and JHeadstart Team,

I would like to urge you to not only move forward and release an ADF JHeadstart 10.1 release – which is an excellent thing to do – but also release a 10.1.2 compliant release of the non-ADF JHeadstart (currently 9.0.5.1).

To allow organizations that do not want to migrate to ADF just now, but DO want to benefit from the many bugfixes in JDeveloper 10.1.2, it is really very important that such a releases becomes available.

As Oracle puts it: productivity with CHOICE. If your choice right now is to NOT use ADF, I think it is not unreasonable to hope for a JHeadstart release that works with 10.1.2 but does not require a full migration to ADF.

Could you shed your light on this? Can you indicate how big a challenge you feel an upgrade of JHeadstart 9.0.5.1 to JDeveloper 10.1.2 (no ADF) would be? (seems to me that it should be relatively light thing to do).

best regards,

Lucas