JHeadstart Blog

At March 14th 2007  Steven Davelaar will run a 1-day seminar on J2EE in Dublin, Ireland.  For more information please follow this link. Everbody that wants to know more about Oracle's tools strategy, JDeveloper, JSF, ADF and JHeadstart is more than welcome. For this seminar it is not required to have any Java skills. Designer/Forms customers will have a great experience as well.

If you want us to organize this event in your country please let us (idevcoe_nl@oracle.com) know and we will see what we can do.

Ton van Kooten

The JHeadstart Team proudly announces two new runs of the successful ADF JHeadstart 10.1.3 Workshop, at the following dates:

• 12 - 16 March 2007
• 11 - 15 June 2007
  

These workshops will be held in De Meern (Netherlands). For more information and for registrations, please contact the Education Service desk, tel. +31 30 66 99 244, or via e-mail esd_nl@oracle.com.

Unable to attend at these dates? Check out the Specials page of Oracle University NL on a regular basis to see when this workshop will be held again in the Netherlands. Want to attend the workshop at a different time and/or location? Read the Custom Delivery section!

Course Description

The JHeadstart Team has developed the ADF JHeadstart Workshop to provide you with the necessary training to use ADF and JHeadstart successfully on your projects. Rather than just explaining the use of the JHeadstart tool, much focus is placed on understanding and working with the ADF technologies that form the foundation of a JHeadstart application: ADF Business Components, Java Server Faces and ADF Faces. In fact, we do not start using JHeadstart until the 4th day of the course. Also, we incorporated many tips and best practices regarding common, real-life issues that will surely be helpful when you start building your own applications.

For a full description of the workshop contents, see the Oracle University page for the ADF JHeadstart workshop.

Learn more

• Customer Reviews of the Workshop
  
• Preparing for the Workshop
• Custom Delivery of the Workshop

JDeveloper ADF projects, so also JHeadstart projects, tend to create many files. A good version
control system is absolutely essential. In our experience, Subversion is a great tool for managing your file versions, and it's free!

Multiple developers can simultaneously work on the same file, it is fast, it has excellent merging capabilities, and it's easy to find the change history of every file. Also, you can create branches and releases, and easily switch your working copy to one of them. And last but not least, text-based files (like .xml and .java) are not marked as changed if only the time stamp has changed and not the contents.



As shown in the example above, when you have made changes, Subversion can give you an overview of the files that changed, and for each file show you in which lines they differ. It is useful for example when upgrading to a newer JHeadstart version, to see which changes were made in the generator templates, so you can copy it to your custom templates.



Subversion is similar to CVS, but without the drawbacks. In 2002, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote an article about the (then new) Subversion project, also explaining which Subversion features make it an improvement on CVS.

If you are new to this type of revision control system, here is a short explanation. For a more detailed explanation see the free online book Version Control with Subversion (the image below is from that book). The main parts of Subversion are:

1. Repository. The repository stores all revisions of the files under version control, and labels them with revision numbers and revision comments. Install it on a server accessible to all developers.
   
2. Client. One or more clients can connect to the repository, and download the files of a certain revision to your personal development environment, or upload and commit changed files.
   

JDeveloper Subversion Client
In JDeveloper 10.1.3 you can install a Subversion extension (plug-in), which will act as a client. More information can be found in the Developer's Guide for the JDeveloper Subversion VCS extension on OTN. Note that it will use the Subversion 1.3 format for the client-side, see also Aino Andriessen's blog entry about this.

Windows-integrated Subversion Client
Personally, I prefer to use TortoiseSVN as a client tool. The images below are from that site. It is implemented as a windows
shell extension, and it's fast and easy to use. Every client action that you might want to do with the Subversion command line tool, you can do easier with TortoiseSVN.

What I like best about TortoiseSVN is the icon overlays. In Windows Explorer, you can immediately see which files are changed, which have conflicts, etc.



In addition, you get context-sensitive context menus for each file. For a versioned file, for example, it might look like this:



In summary, it's a best practice to use Subversion for managing the files of your JHeadstart projects. Check out the Subversion site and the book, get someone to install it on your development server, and install TortoiseSVN on every developer PC. Commit all project files to the repository, and let everyone checkout to their local working copy.
From that moment on, if developers change files, let them commit, so that the others can update their working copies. That's all you need to get started!

Update: see also the JHeadstart Blog post "Version Control for ADF-JHeadstart Applications", which discusses

• Version control models
• Requirements for a good version control system
• Which files to version?

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