Oracle JDeveloper and ADF 11g Have Arrived

The very first production pieces of the 11g Fusion Middleware stack are available for download. Now you can start building your very rich Ajax applications with the technology of your choice, including JSF, EJB 3.0, ADF, and Spring, all of which is running on the WebLogic Application Server. Here is the very impressive list of 11g new features.

Important note: This release does not contain any of the SOA and WebCenter capabilities, those are currently scheduled to be released in the first half of 2009.

If you’re a WebCenter customer, or are interested in adding WebCenter capabilities, such as portlets, content integration, runtime customization, threaded discussions, wikis, blogs, tags, links, etc. to your applications, you have two options to choose from:

1. Start building your application using the 10.1.3.x release of JDeveloper, ADF, and Oracle Webcenter. This is nothing new, this option has been around ever since WebCenter 10.1.3.2 was released.
   Pros: You can consume content and portlets in applications today.
   Cons: You don’t have the richness of the 11g ADF-Faces components. Also, you’ll have to go through a migration process to get your applications from 10.1.3.x to 11.
2. Use the newly released JDeveloper and ADF 11g to build the model and the ADF view layers of your application, and inject the WebCenter and SOA parts when they become available.
   Pros: You can use the full power of the new ADF-Faces components, and the greatly improved JDeveloper right away, deployed to WebLogic Server.
   Cons: No SOA or WebCenter functionality available yet.

In addition to weighing the importance of the capabilities mentioned above, you’ll also have to take your time lines (development, test/stage, production) into account.

Oracle JDeveloper 11g Announced

In the Developer Keynote Ted Farrell announced Oracle JDeveloper 11g and ADF 11g. The release date is October 1. While this release doesn’t contain full SOA and WebCenter capabilities, the production version of JDeveloper and ADF allows you to get started with actual development. As the SOA and WebCenter pieces become available you can easily add them to your ADF applications.