It’s not yet announced on OTN, but Steve Muench has the news that JDeveloper 11 preview 2 is available. You can download it here (list of new features, Release notes).
JDeveloper 11 preview 2 available
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Tag Archives: oracle
Oracle Java Tools technical briefing
Last Tuesday Ted Farell gave a short technical presentation about JDeveloper 11g in the Oracle offices in the Netherlands. Not too much new information, especially if you’ve downloaded the preview of JDeveloper 11. But the good news is that a new preview will be available soon, probably the begining of October.
ADF Faces has improved quite a bit in release 11. You’ll be able to render AJAX based webpages, including drag and drop and tables that retrieve new rows in the fly while you move the scrollbar. Charts can be rendered in flash and svg. JDeveloper 11g allows you to set up templates, and visually modify the editable sections in JDeveloper. You will also be able to visually create composite components which can be reused in multiple pages.
Another bit improvement in JDeveloper 11 is MDS, Metadata services. MDS will contain all modification and customization to an application. For more info see Oracle Webcenter.
Oracle is moving towards more and more declarative development, but different from the way it worked in Oracle Designer. Declarative mostly means xml files, for example bpel processes or jsf pages. All these declarative pieces of your application can be customized and these customizations will be stored in MDS (either in a database or in files). Previously, you would use code generators to turn your declarative application definition into runable code. According to Ted Farell, the problem with this approach is that it’s hard to monitor. You are not running what you defined. The current approach is different in that your declarative components are actually running (the bpel specification, the jsf page), and when monitoring and debugging you are seeing what you defined.
I’m not sure i fully agree with this statement. At least in the case of JSF/JSP the code generation has just moved, from compile time, to just before runtime. I’ve opened generated java source code quite often to debug jsp problems.
The next release of ADF will allow you to create ADF Data Controls which can be used in MS-Office. This will enable you to use for example Excel as a gui tool, while implementing your business and data layer in java.
Also new in the next release of ADF Faces is the Activity Guide. This is a UI component for BPEL processes.
Oracle documentation now with user comments
The documentation for Oracle RDBMS 11g enables users to leave comments. That’s an welcome improvement. I’ve always appreciated the user comments on the php and mysql documentation, as it often includes problems (and solutions) with common use cases. Most software documentation is a long list of “this is what we have, and here’s more of what we have”. But it’s usually the real life examples that help the most. I hope that the user comments on the Oracle documentation will prove to be just as useful.
Oracle Database 11g available for download
You can now download Oracle 11g for linux on OTN. It has grown quite a bit compared to 10gR2: 1.7Gb instead of 660 Mb. The documentation is here.
JDeveloper 11g Technical Preview available
Shay Shmeltzer just posted that JDeveloper 11g is available for download: Download of the Day – JDeveloper 11 Technology Preview. The new features page has a long list of improvements, too long for me to list here.
The most awaited feature is probably the new ADF Faces Richt Client components, with full support of AJAX. For AJAX development a Javascript debugger and editor is included, and for database developers, all of the functionality of SQLDeveloper is included.
You can also download a new versions of oc4j and toplink, and JDeveloper is also available as a download for Apple Mac.
Oracle, Blogging Respect, Web 2.0, and Unbreakable Linux
Robert Scoble is linking to Justin Kestelyn who is asking why Oracle isn’t getting any blogging respect, especially around Web 2.0. According to Robert Oracle would get more respect if they’d invite more bloggers over to Oracle blogging events. Sure, I haven’t seen any events especially targeted at bloggers, but they recently organized a special event for Partners, which i blogged about (though not as much as i would have liked).
During this event Oracle demoed some of the upcoming web 2.0 features in it’s products. Tagging, relating information, wiki, presence, mashups, Ajax will all be available out of the box with Webcenter and JDeveloper 11g. I think this will earn Oracle some web 2.0 respect, when released. You can see some pictures of the demos here.
One commenter on Scoble’s blog said the lack of respect could be caused by Unbreakable Linux, which is seen as a cheap rip off of RedHat Enterprise Linux. According to this commenter Oracle should have created their own distribution. It may be a cause of disrespect, but i think Oracle did a good thing not inventing yet another Linux distribution. There are already enough Linux distributions. In fact, many people claim the problem with open source is that everybody wants to come up with their own solution, instead of working together on one solution. So i think it’s a good thing Oracle didn’t create their own distribution.
There are still a lot of people afraid of using open source because they think it’s not as well supported as commercial closed source software. This is the problem Oracle is trying to fix by providing support for Linux. They want people to migrate to Linux by giving them confidence in the support available.
Another reason for providing Linux support may their focus on making Grid computing easily manageable. If you want to run a grid of a 1000 cpu’s, doing upgrades or installing software should be easy. You want 24*7 availability, while still being able install upgrades and fixes. Oracle is doing this for their database and middleware software, by improving the provisioning facilities in Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. By providing support for the operating system, they can also improve management of the grid on the operating system level.
What do you think, should Oracle have made it’s own distribution?
Oracle Webcenter
Initially i though webcenter was more or less the same as Oracle Portal, but implemented in Java, with some additional web 2.0 components. But the vision behind Webcenter is a bit different. Portal is basically a container where you add in external content. The Portal combines all the external content, and allows the user or an admin to the container and the presentation.
Webcenter is different, it’s not a container. It’s a framework that allows a developer to include external content into a JSF page. Content can come from different locations, for example using WSRP (Web Services for remote portlets) or JSR 170 (Content repository API).
This means that every application, every page can be a portal container. The other main feature of Portal, customization, will be handled through MDS, Oracle’s Metadata Services. The MDS enables you to customize any application after it’s been deployed. All metadata that is part of the deployment unit (war, ear, composite app) can be customized. Using MDS you’ll be able to add pieces to a JSF page, or change the look and feel.
All xml in a deployment unit is considered metadata, and loaded into MDS. MDS can use a database to store this data, but can also be filebased, to ease development. Using Xslt all the XML metadata can be customized after deployment. This includes ADF Faces pages (you’ll probably have to create jspx pages), but also bpel process definitions.
From what i understand, MDS is already a part of Oracle’s eBusiness Suite. Starting with Oracle Fusion Middleware version 11g it will be available to all applications using OFM, so you can use it to customize your own applications. The MDS customization engine is an important core part of the Fusion architecture.
So using webcenter framework and MDS you can create composite pages containing content from different locations, and users and administrators can customize these pages. In 11g Oracle will also provide container pages, or shells, which can be used by administrators to assemble pages by adding content. This can be content created by developers, or content from a content repository. The webcenter services add additional functionality which can be added to pages like discussions, wiki’s, mashups, rss, voip (click-to-call) and communities. User will be able to create relations between different pieces of content using linking and tagging.
Jdeveloper 11g will be extended to support portal page development. You can create JSF template pages (container pages), which contain protected and non-protected areas. Developers will be able to add (drag and drop) content only to unprotected areas. In Jdeveloper 11g there will also be a new way to create page flows called ADF Task Flows. Not sure what the difference is with JSF pageflows, but it was mentioned that this enables page flows in a portlet while preserving back button functionality. During the demo it looked the same as JSF pageflows (in jdeveloper). Having a separate file with task flows might also make customization using MDS easier than when you have to customize an entire faces-config.xml file.
So to conclude, using webcenter every page will be able to function like a portal page. Using MDS you can add content to every ADF Faces page and customize it.
Adding ADF data control drop options
I’m currently in the ADF deep dive session by Duncan Mills at Oracle’s Xtreme PTS. Wasn’t sure if it would be worth attending, as most presentations here have been pretty high level. But Duncan had a nice trick which i didn’t know: you can customize the drop options that are available when you drop data controls on an adf faces page. The options are configured using the file aces_creator_configuration.xml (in $JDEV_HOME/jdev/system/oracle.adfm.dt.faces.10.1.3.40.66/). You can add new options, single components or complex components, to this file. The file uses velocity templates, so you add some expressions to dynamically configure the components as they are dropped on a page.
Oracle Xtreme PTS
I’m currently in Redwood City attending Oracle’s Xtreme PTS event, which is an event organized by Oracle’s Platform Technologies Solutions support team. The goal of this team is to help Oracle partners deliver better solutions to their customers, and this week a large number of partners are invited to learn about Oracle solutions and products.
I think this week is an excellent idea, as it’s pretty hard to keep up with Oracle. A lot of new products have been released in the last few years, and even more products have been bought by Oracle and are currently being integrated into the Oracle products. Oracle is buying so much that even last weeks event agenda is already outdated. The new agenda includes a session on Tangosol Coherence.
Today we had sessions on the new features in the 11G database, Oracle’s Management tools, and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Other session discussed how Oracle can help partners through Oracle PTS and Oracle Support and how partners can use Oracle’s support tools like Configuration Support Manager.
Here are some pictures i made, first a kitesurfer under the Golden Gate Bridge, and another picture of the Oracle offices.
Oracle open sources Toplink
The part of Toplink which implements JPA, Toplink Essentials, was already open source, and part of the JEE 5 reference implementation, but today Oracle announced that it will completely open source Toplink (pressrelease ). Toplink not only implements JPA, it also support JAXB, SDO and JCA, which means that it’s a pretty complete persistency solution. Oracle is also increasing it’s contribution to Eclipse, by joining the board of directors of the Eclipse foundation, and by creating an Eclipse project called Eclipse Persistence Platform based on Toplink (FAQ (pdf)).
What does this mean? That Oracle is still focusing on the open source part of the Java world. They are not converting a lot of java programmers to JDeveloper and ADF, with ADF being tied to JDeveloper. Instead, open source java programmers are targeted through Eclipse, by adding all the Oracle technologies that may interest 3gl java programmers this IDE.
It also means there is less of a barrier to use Toplink extensions on projects. I always prefer to stick to the standards whenever possible. But JPA does have some missing pieces, which Toplink, but also Hibernate, fixes by included some non standard functionality. Support for stored procedures is one example. In the past I’ve hesitated to use these extensions, because it limits you how you can distribute your application. For example, we have a development server virtual appliance we use on most projects, which includes version control, bug database, build server, etc. This is all based on open source, because it allows you to take it to all your customers. Now we can include applications based on Toplink in this vmware machine.