Future of Swing Developement in JDeveloper 11g ?

Question

The Swing part (in the preview) still is unfortunately far behind NetBeans (have a look at Version 6 M9 Matisse with JPA beans binding, not as good as ADF but...) and others, are there any plans to integrate Matisse and/or JSR 296 in the production release? Or is JSF the only technology on the gui layer that is pushed by Oracle in the future?
What's with javaFX (F3)??
best regards
Charly

Answer 1

Charly,
this first 11g technology preview reflects the bulk of the features in the UI clients areas that will be available in the initial 11.1.1.0.0 release when it goes production. I agree that the JDK 6.0 GroupLayout layout manager made popular by NetBean's Project "Matisse" GUI builder is a very interesting one from a developer productivity point of view -- it dupliates some of the productive layout "guides" ideas I believe first seen in the Visual Studio 2005 Windows Forms designer. We have our eye on supporting it in a subsequent 11g release. However, that support unfortunately won't make the initial production release of 11g. We also support the JSR 296 and are following it for including support in a future release, too. Regarding JavaFX (F3), just as you are this week, we're getting our first real look at what it means. I assume if it becomes a popular option it will be something to support for future JDev releases as well. We have significant 2/3-tier Swing data binding features that should fit in nicely with JavaFX, but it's honestly too early to say what our plans are there.
Of course we continue full support of our existing ADF Swing features (including the productive JGoodies FormLayout support we introduced in 10.1.3). We've added a few new interesting ADF Swing components as noted in the 11g "New Features" document, too, as well as rewritten the critically important ADF Business Components Browser testing tool using ADF Swing during this release as a showcase and testbed of ADF Swing functionality.
While from the new features list you can see we've improved features in many major feature area, in the "UI Clients" area much of the UI-related features in this initial 11g release are out of necessity centered around the significant declarative application development requirements put to us by our Oracle Fusion Applications teams (who are building front-ends using JSF Rich Client). We have thousands of internal apps developers, many of whom have already begun using early builds of our 11g technology platform for development of their next generation of Oracle Fusion Applications.
In this initial 11g release cycle, given these multitudinous requirements presented to us by our combined Oracle, Peoplesoft, Siebel, and JDEdwards teams, there was reduced bandwidth available for making significant enhancements to our other kinds of UI clients that we continue to support like Struts, ADF Swing, or Mobile clients.
This definitely does not mean there are not enhancements queued up, waiting to be implemented in future releases in these areas. Only that the initial 11g release doesn't have an "explosion" of new features in those areas.