Discussion on:

Odd little Oracle JDeveloper bug

Okay, so my first try at a YouTube screencast flopped--the audio track did not survive after the AVI got converted by YouTube. I'll try and figure that out before I do this again.

But ignoring that, I was just hoping for some feedback on the overall appeal of these types of screencasts. I have a couple of topics in mind where I thought I might illustrate the concept with one of these screencasts. Should I try, or are these things just a waste of bandwidth?

But I cannot bloody stand them. Thanks to the YouTube clip, any reader behind a twitchy firewall will appear to be goofy off or accessing restricted/prohibited materials (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=392). Plus, it is not usable/accessible to the handicapped, vision imparied, and so on (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=40), as well as suffering from the other issues that I have with *casting in general. And, of course, I generally am against any kind of "mashups", *particularly* on a commerical Web site (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=24).

But that is just one person's opinion.

J.Ja

[Edited 7/27/07: To make it clear, I did not actually look at the video itself, YouTube generally overcompresses them anyways and makes it hard to see details. So I am reacting against the idea itself, not your particular video!]

Turns out the YouTube videos are also problemmatic for this publishing platform. They had a problem where the video stopped working for some reason and so they had to move the HTML that inserts it to the top of my post. Instead of towards the bottom where I had originally placed it.

Given that it doesn't seem to add value and it causes technical glitches on the site, I guess I'll do without. It just kinda seems like a shame because there's video and animation going on in the ads. It would be nice to have some in the content as well to provide balance I think.

As a member of the JDeveloper development team, this kind of thing is actually very useful. It's often hard to reproduce problems like this without seeing them in-action...

(BTW: I added a todo item to look into this issue when I'm back in the office on Monday)

I do agree that multimedia has a place on the Web, but it needs to be very carefully handled. I would much rather prefer to see TechRepublic's publishing platform have its own widget that I could use, so at least the source was coming from TechRepublic.com, not YouTube or whatever. I will say though, you did a good job at describing in text what the video would show, so no one who did not watch the video missed something.

Luckily for us, programming is a discipline where the action is not even worth showing 99% of the time... what is someone going to see, me tyoing text into an editor, or dragging and dropping something onto the screen?

J.Ja

I am rather surprised, since JDeveloper is/was done by Borland (its sister product is JBuilder). What, you thought Oracle could make something that good on their own?

J.Ja

This is a misapprehension that unfortunately has plagued JDeveloper for years...

JDeveloper 3.2 released in 2000 was the last version of JDeveloper that was based on licensed code from Borland. JDeveloper was completely rewritten from the ground up by Oracle in mid 2000, and released as JDeveloper 9.0.2 in 2001.

Out of curiosity, Justin, have you ever actually tried JDeveloper? If so, what don't you like about it specifically?

... that was the version of JDeveloper (3X, the Borland based version) I was using. 2001/2002 was the last time I did work in Java. Like I said, I thought it was decent at the time. I figured out that it was really JBuilder, because I had just tried that around the time too, and saw that it was the same. I cannot speak to its current quality. I will be frankly honest, every tool from Oracle I have ever used since then was total junk, from SQLLDR to "Enterprise Manager", even the SQL notepad thingy stinks. Whether or not that applies to JDeveloper in its current incarnation, I cannot say since I have not used it recently, but hopefully, in this case, "past performance is no gaurantee of future returns". Hopefully, it is not plagued by the same kind of insanely stupid and obvious bugs that the rest of Oracle's toolset is, things like dropping the first character typed into a text box...

J.Ja

Like I said, I kinda have to use JDeveloper since I work at an Oracle shop. But I will say that it's a pretty good IDE. It definitely does not have the large community of plug-in developers that Eclipse has. But in terms of doing Java coding it stands up pretty well.

And the integration with the Oracle database is pretty darn good. I mean you wouldn't want to do DBA-type tasks with JDeveloper. But in terms of building PL/SQL packages and creating tables, it's decent. Not as complete as TOAD, and so I do find myself usually running both TOAD and JDeveloper when I am working on anything. Ironically I find TOAD's support of Java stored procs is better than JDevelopers.

Where I find JDeveloper really handy is that it can deploy so easily into OC4J containers like the ones used to power Oracle Portal. There's an OC4J container built into JDeveloper as well so you can test your deploys in an environment essentially identical to your target, which is nice.

I keep a list of JDeveloper releases here:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0118231/stories/2005/02/25/historyOfJdeveloperReleases.html

you can see a lot of (cool!) things have happened since 2001 when we jettisoned all traces of the original Borland code case.

The latest info and downloads on today's JDeveloper release is here:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html

Steve -

Thanks for the links! While I am not a JDeveloper user, it is always interesting to read the history of how things develop, it gives a nice snapshot of the changes that Java and Oracle's relationship to it have been through.

J.Ja

I have filed bug 6309777 in our bug database for this issue.

You look like you know, both ends of SQLServer and Oracle. I need some information on how to connect between SQLServer 2005 & Jdeveloper. Please give the instructions here or e-mail me at dvrameshusa at gmail dot com.
Thanks
Ramesh