Shay Shmeltzer's Weblog

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On one of the comments for my entry about migrating code from NetBeans to JDeveloper Peter asked if JDeveloper can work with the woodstock components.

The answer is yes - see this demo:

So basically you do get a lot of functionality - although it is not as advanced as what we built for ADF Faces or for the open source Trinidad components - click the links for demos of those in JDeveloper.

Sun stopped the development of the woodstock components a while back - and we think that people who used woodstock should look into ADF Faces components instead - we actually created a Woodstock to ADF Faces matrix that shows the parallels - and there are a lot more components that you can use with ADF Faces.

P.S. - turns out I already did a similar demo a year ago and forgot about it.

The next bunch of our highly successful OTN Fusion Development Experience workshops is about to start in a couple of weeks.

These are free one day event where we spend the first half day explaining the technology through slides and demos, and then we let you actually work with the technology on your own machine - bring your laptop and we'll take care of the rest.

The schedule for the next few months looks like this:
Salt Lake City, UT February 9
Reston, VA February 16
Portland, OR March 2
Calgary, Alberta March 18
Irvine (Orange County), CA April 6
Atlanta, GA April 1st
(there are also a couple of events in the UK)

For Registration and more information go here.

This is a great introduction to what JDeveloper and ADF is all about, whether you are doing your first steps in the Java world coming from tools like Forms, powerbuilder or visual basic, or whether you are a veteran Java developer using Eclipse or NetBeans - and you want to see an easier way to build rich application - we have something for you.

Hope you'll join us.

So Oracle now own NetBeans as well as JDeveloper - but can code be migrated between the two?

The answer is yes - and it is quite simple actually - have a look.

If you are a developer with an open mind and you like to explore new IDEs and you decide that you want to have a look at JDeveloper we have lots of demos and tutorials for you on OTN. Most of them will show you how to create an application from scratch in JDeveloper; what if you actually want to try the tool on your existing source/project?

I'm working on a short how-to that covers the basic steps for this, and while working on this I recorded that short 10 minutes demo that shows you how to take one of NetBeans' sample application - the consulting agency - which uses JPA and JSF and open, compile and run it with JDeveloper and WebLogic.
.

The basic steps are:
Create project from existing source (or WAR).
Set project properties in JDeveloper and add libraries.
Compile and Run.

In the specific application I picked there were some other tricky parts like a mislocated persistence.xml file (not under META-INF), a reference to dynafaces that seems to be dead, and a connection to the Derby database.
But I got all of this sorted out and working.

Now I could use the visual JSF editor in JDeveloper to edit the pages.

Now that the Sun deal is done, we can finally explain our strategy for the Java development tools and what we are planning to do with the various tools.

If you missed Thomas Kurian's section in today's event, check out the following for the basics on our Java development tools strategy:
The basic FAQ is here.
And you get more information by watching this web cast about the Java development tools.

So how close were your predictions?

Want to learn about the other parts of technology check out this page.

No, we are not canceling the Oracle Java Newsletter (now called Dev2Dev), it's just that I'm quitting my moonlighting job as a newsletter editor and putting it in the capable hands of Justin from OTN.
I've been editing the newsletter since the first edition in May 2004. Our goal was to have a vehicle to let Java developers know about the new things that have come up over the past month and to make it easier to keep track of upcoming trends and technologies.

That first edition went out to about 70,000 people - last month the newsletter went out to over 1 Million people.

In the first few editions we didn't had a lot of material and in many cases I ended up writing specific articles for the newsletter like the Teaching Oracle JDeveloper to Make Coffee.

Over time my job got a bit easier as more and more Java related articles appeared on OTN and blogs started to appear covering the Oracle Java landscape - all I had to do was find the interesting entries and link to them, and the blog section got bigger with time.

It's been a fun ride, thanks for all the people whose content allowed us to keep the newsletter running and informative for so long. I hope the newsletter has been a helpful monthly pointer to useful stuff.

If you are still not getting the newsletter add it to your OTN profile.

There were a couple of threads on OTN where people asked whether they can have a generic default structure for a java file when JDeveloper creates it. Usually this is in order to add some header/footer type of structure/comment to the start and end of the file, for example to include file info and copy right.

Right now JDeveloper doesn't have a file template concept (it's on our to-do list for a future version), but a quick way to achieve a similar result is to create a code template that can be used with the surround with option in the code editor to enclose your file with the code you want.
This is leveraging the new capabilities of the code template mechanism in JDeveloper 11g.

Here is a short demo showing how to do this:

It's a slow week at work as most of the people are on vacation. So you might be wondering what to do with your extra free time.
Here is one option - catch up with some new blogs out there that cover JDeveloper and ADF.

Here are some of the latest additions since my last bloggers update:
Husain Dalal - http://husaindalal.blogspot.com/
Andreas Koop - http://multikoop.blogspot.com/
Nick Haralabidis - http://jdeveloperfaq.blogspot.com
Jean-Philippe Melanson - http://jplmelanson.wordpress.com/
Niall Commiskey - http://niallcblogs.blogspot.com/
Sameh Shokry Nassar - http://samehshokrynassar.blogspot.com
Ram Immidisetti - http://rimmidis.blogspot.com/
Jesse - http://adfbits.blogspot.com/
Stanley Guan - http://xmlandmore.blogspot.com/
Don Raikes - http://jdev-access.blogspot.com
Ed Eaglehouse - http://suncat-jsf.blogspot.com

As always a good RSS to add to your favorite aggregator is the JDeveloper/ADF blogs update feed: http://www.connotea.org/rss/user/jdeveloper

Got a new JDev/ADF blog that I missed - update the wiki list here:
http://wiki.oracle.com/page/List+of+Oracle-related+blogs
and leave a comment on this post.

Someone asked on OTN if we can use data coming from a Web service to populate a hierarchical tree in a JSF page.
The answer is yes - and with the Web service data control this is actually very simple in JDeveloper 11g.

Here is a quick demo:

In the previous blog entry I showed how to do a search page using the execute with parameters operation. This entry is a little more up-to-date and uses the new view criteria and query components that have been added in JDeveloper 11g.
One nice aspect here is that it also lets you change the UI component for the parameters to be input with list of values.

Here is the demo: