Oracle has today released Oracle JDeveloper 11g Release 2, along with an update to their meta MVC framework Oracle ADF (Application Development Framework).
The release includes:
- Support for JavaServer Faces 2.0 and Facelets to both JDeveloper and ADF
- A visual CSS editor for ADF
- Improvements to RESTful web services support, making it easier to use REST services as data sources in Oracle ADF
- Improvements to Maven support, which were previewed in the previous release
Elsewhere, Oracle have integrated the Hudson continuous integration server into Oracle Team Productivity Center (TPC), its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) add-in to JDeveloper.
The biggest changes to JDeveloper however are under the covers. Of most note is that the IDE has been re-architected to sit on top of an OSGi backbone. This makes the creation of OSGi based extensions for Oracle JDeveloper much easier, and also significantly reduces start-up times. Duncan Mills, Oracle’s senior director of product management for Oracle's Application Development Tools, told InfoQ
This is bringing down the start-up times by three quarters in most cases, obviously depending on what modules and what capabilities you have loaded. One of the problems and benefits of an IDE like JDeveloper is that is it so broad, it has so many bits of tooling, everything from database tooling, to SOA tooling, to diagramming in UML, that unless you have a nice modular system like this, you pay a price unless you want to do a little bit of everything.
Oracle has also made improvements to the hot deployment capabilities of the ADF framework. Mills told us
We can essentially hot deploy as the developer makes changes to the metadata, or to the screens, or even to the code. That all gets hot deployed back into the running application server, so there is no need to stop and start the application server, or re-deploy the application.
The JDeveloper IDE is focused primarily on customers using the database and Fusion Middleware, and is used as the vehicle for all of the tooling around both Fusion Middleware and the database. This includes the BPEL, Portal and BI design-time tools. The platform also serves as the basis of another Oracle product, SQL Developer, which Oracle Corporation promotes specifically to PL/SQL and database developers.
JDeveloper is proprietary software, but free for development and deployment. Oracle ADF 11g is free to download for evaluation and use during development. A production license for Oracle ADF is included with all editions of Oracle WebLogic Server, or can be licensed separately. Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.