One thing that I really don't like about Oracle.
The new JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 Developer Preview is available for download on OTN, and this raises a pain point for me...
One thing I don't like about Oracle is the way we number the versions of our products. It makes it quite hard for a normal customer to figure out which of the versions is a major release and which is a minor. JDeveloper seems to be a constant victim of the numbering approach - I'm willing to bet there are still many developers who think that our move from 10.1.2 to 10.1.3 was a little upgrade with a couple of new features.
In reality this was a major release for us where we revamped everything from the level of icons and up.
And if that wasn't enough, what would you make of an upgrade from 10.1.3 to 10.1.3.1?
Even a smaller update, you would say, probably just bug fixes...
Well that's not the case - take a look at the 10.1.3.1 developer preview version of JDeveloper that we put out on OTN today and you'll suddenly realize that this is another version that doesn't get the respect it deserves.
So, what's new?
The major thing is that JDeveloper just turned into an SOA development tool. With the new BPEL and ESB integration you can create BPEL flows and ESB process in a visual way. As a side feature you also get a visual XSLT mapping tool to simplify transformations.
If you don't care about SOA and you think of yourself as an enterprise Java developer - then the improved support for EJB 3.0 and JPA is what you should look at. We've been offering support for EJB 3.0 since the early access of 10.1.3, and in the 10.1.3 version that went out production in Jan this year - but since this version was out before the final spec was approved, we had an early implementation of EJB 3.0.
Now in 10.1.3.1 we support the final specification of EJB 3.0 and JPA.
We also introduced several new features in that area, most important is the full development cycle for JAP entities - from reverse engineering of the database to generation of clients that can test the entities outside of the container.
Even if you don't care about neither SOA nor EJB 3.0, the new JDeveloper has a long list of bugs that it fixes check them out here.
So, don't be full by our numbering mechanism - go and download JDeveloper 10.1.3.1 Developer Preview and see what it can offer to you.
