JDeveloper

From APIDesign

Revision as of 08:28, 13 June 2011

JDeveloper is the primary IDE for support of Oracle non-open source technologies (like ADF). I really like JDeveloper's support for working with XML, it is much better than the one we offer in NetBeans.

When we learned that Sun was going to be acquired by Oracle in April 2009 we knew we want to change NetBeans to get ready to be acquired. We started to speculate what could make NetBeans attractive for Oracle. I really mean speculate as up until first quarter of 2011 (when the acquisition was approved by Europian Commission) there was no signals from Oracle to help us understand what way to improve NetBeans. Tough situation. Moreover complicated by the fact that people around were fired every few months and those who stayed had little trust in the future. Still I hoped we will get a chance to prove that NetBeans (and NetBeans Platform) can be useful).

It become clear that the crusial part is going to be our relationship with JDeveloper. No company can sponsor two projects doing almost the same thing in a different way for an unlimited amount of time. We needed to find a way to share. As it is always easier to share when there is a common ground, I started to talk more about OSGi.

I convinced my management and OSGi became main theme for NetBeans 6.9. The Netigso project was a proof of concept demonstrating the whole approach can work. Still there was a lot of things to improve to raise the whole OSGi support to production quality level. In spite of being depresed more and more every day, the NetBeans team worked really hard and I am thankful for that. As a result the NetBeans 6.9 offered OSGi support for every developer. The NetBeans Platform was now built not only on standard UI toolkit, but also de-facto standard module system. Everyone could benefit, but I admit my primary motivation was to met JDeveloper half-way.