My JDeveloper Training

I have been undergoing the Oracle ADF and JDeveloper training for a future project. It was pretty hard for me to accept that i am undergoing this training considering my strong belief in eclipse-as-a-platform. I started the training by asking, if all/many of the JDeveloper features are available in Eclipse and soon realized that JDeveloper does have a strong set of database feature set.

There are some discrete set of database features that are available for Eclipse. These 2 projects do provide good plugins to improve the productivity of the database developer on Eclipse.

• Dali JPA Tools
• Eclipse Link Project

OK, but dont feel happy about it. For the set of features that JDeveloper has, its difficult to compare the feature set with Eclipse. In my view we should not even compare. At the end of the training, i am sort of started believing that its apt to call JDeveloper as Integrated Services Environment (ISE). Its has many things inside. For me it looked like the concepts of Application, Project, Module, Entity Object and View Objects are tightly integrated with JDeveloper. I cant imagine to build a complex application “-which is tightly integrated with DataBase and ADF-” without JDeveloper.

Of-course i “think” its possible to develop some decent ADF applciations without JDeveloper. We can still develop the UI with the help of the ADF Faces and JSF in Eclipse, but there is no support (as i know) of ADF BusinessComponents in Eclipse till date (03/27/2008). I guess people can still develop some good Oracle ADF applications with the help of EJB3 and JPA stuff.

In the end JDeveloper does many things with Database/Class Diagrams, ADF Components, Business Rules, EJB, Toplink, WebServices, Database Connection, SOA Stuff (not sure what exactly it does with SOA), JSP, JSF, Struts and much more. Some of the features can be pulled into the eclipse and one can use pulse to do this.

As an Eclipse lover, i am just waiting for a good ADF plugin into the Eclipse world. ahem….