During my working years as a Java developer, and holding the flag of Java on Oracle(well even before I became officially an Orcle Staff) I was always tempted to know how is it going at the other side of the competition, how do you, Microsoft Guys work?
I was really neither convinced that I had to change my belief and work for some company as a "Microsoft developer" to discover this, nor was I convinced that I have to purchase, download, or borrow a book on .net and start at my free time, because my free time is for me, not for Microsoft :) and I was not convinced to sacrifice it.
It happened that I ve got the golden opportunity to help a friend with a project with my expertise as a developer, and guess what? it was a .net project, and I had to roll up my sleeves and get down into the .net development environment to discover the fantasies of microsoft.
I have found that when you need to display a table's data, you just drag and drop what was called a data grid, then a wizard appears and voila, you have got your table. In literally 15 seconds!!!! Amazing, really it was.
Wait, wait. Don't speculate. I am not by any means deciding now that it is microsoft that prevails. On the other side, i have known the reality about it all :) It just prevents unexperienced developers from getting experienced, and make them stick to its wizards and remain as such.
On the other side, to do this in Java, you had to do this by yourself, to the latest details, and I mean it. Most of you understand what I mean so I won't get into technical details.
I was just amazed by the idea that I can finish a .net project in a tenth of the time if it is a straight forward with some lists and lookups, which is the case for small projects. so what the heck? why don't I just be somehow unethical, and buy this?
Then I thought that if I am going to buy it, I would buy it smart. I would search for a counterpart for this within my side.
What I have discovered then that I have a typical similar environment to build applications like the .net development environment called Oracle JDeveloper 10g.
JDeveloper as an IDE is not more than a fancy editor that I really admire(well, I have go to do this as an Oracle staff anyways :). But digging down in the Oracle ADF framework, and its integration into JDeveloper 10g, I have displayed the data of a table into a web page with all the whistles and wheels (a.k.a. paging and navigation) in less than 3 minutes. And I have not wrote a single line of code. It was all drag and drop of objects into GUI and here is my first page in the application up and running, hot, straight and normal.
You can discover this for yourself.Point your browser to:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe9051jdev/adftojsp/defaultendtoend.htm
and do the tutorial. You will like it.
You could also check the page suggested by Steve Muench in his comment to this blog via the url:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/adf/learnadf.html
In my humble opinion, it gives an edge over .net because it is as easy as .net, meanwhile I have the full power and flexibility to tweak, change, modify and enhance my old plain java code sitting behind.
