ODTUG 2008 day 3: JDeveloper and BPA Suite

The third day of the conference, I decided to go check out some of the features of JDeveloper11g. The first session was done by Susan Duncan and Lynn Munsinger. The session showed the integration with Subversion. They had a very cool format: Susan was the PM who talked about the features of JDeveloper and some best practices with subversion. Meanwhile Lynn created an application that she checked in. Susan and Lynn then created a conflict in a JSPX file. Some of the cool features that they showed us were:

• XML aware merging in JDeveloper. This is really helpful, especially because a lot of the files in Java development are xml. One really cool part was that the visual editor actually showed the place of the merge conflict visually!
• Chat client in JDeveloper. I am not sure I will ever use it, I like my own chat client just fine. But the ideas is nice and you can use your own chat provider.
• Incoming changes from other developers. You can poll the svn repository for changes. They thought about this feature: you can set the timing in the preferences, so you don’t slow JDeveloper too much

The session was fun and informative, despite some technical difficulties they suffered.

The second session was about reusability features in JDeveloper. Shaun O’Brien talked about the resource catalog, libraries, page fragments, task flows, and page templates. I really like the taks flows: I think this is an important improvement in JSF, and I hope this will be added to the specification. The resource catalog, the templates and the possibility to compose components by combining existing ones are powerful concepts as well. The presentation lacked a demo, though.

The last session was really up my alley: a session about the BPA Suite. There were only a few people in the room, but we had a very interesting exchange of ideas. This was stimulated by the presenter, Ann Horton. She had a nice introduction and demo, and asked plenty of questions to fuel the conversation. I hope ODTUG will have more of these next year…