IT-eye

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.