JDeveloper Developer Preview Updates - An Open Letter

Question

I recently was scanning through this forum and saw a thread on updates to the preview edition. In this thread, an Oracle spokesperson said that the developer preview goes through almost as rigorous a process as a production release, therfore; previews are updated infrequently. Most of the comments on thread indicate that people want more, not fewer, updates. Indeed, if I cared about the stability of the product, I would be running 9.x of JDeveloper. NO. Want I want to do is receive FREQUENT updates to the preview and be able to provide immediate feedback. It also seems that Oracle should LISTEN to their customers. While the product manager may have legitimate reasons for thinking fewer updates is better, the customers seem to be saying that the PM is wrong. We all want the same thing, JDeveloper to be the best Jave IDE available, period. I can hear in my head the polite response from Oracle justifying infrequent updates. But the justification isn;t necessary. It was clear to me that people are getting frustrated with the current version and have begun moving on. In that case it wion't matter how good the next Jdeveloper is because nobody will see it. They will al be using Eclipse or Idea.
Sincerely, Keith Williams

Answer 1

I respectfully remind you that the feature footprint of the entire JDeveloper 10.1.3 product is really quite massive, compared to the open source projects you're likely thinking about. We're talking about much more than a core IDE that lets you code and debug. The full JDeveloper product is on the order of magnitude of a Visual Studio Enterprise Architect Edition -- with, I'd argue, even more functionality than that has -- in a product that is now free. We surely have tons of automated regressions tests, automated UI interaction testing, and performance testing in all the various layers of the product, but the number of different use cases to test when you begin mixing and matching the various:
-- view-layer technologies we support (JSP, JSF, Swing, Mobile clients)
-- controller-layer technologies we support (Struts, JSF Navigation Cases)
-- business tier-layer technologies we support (JavaBeans, EJB 2.0, EJB 2.1, EJB 3.0, TopLink, WebServices, XML, ADF Business Components, etc)
-- J2EE application servers that we support
-- database servers that we support
-- open source technologies we provide integrated support for (JUnit, Ant, XDoclet, CVS)
-- platforms we test running on (Windows, Linux, Mac)
Makes for a meaty set of use cases that all need to be verified before we're satisfied with the quality.
When you release something that delivers less end-to-end functionality or doesn't support the same matrix of different technology and server configurations, there's obviously less to test.
There is currently no other development environment on the market (open source or otherwise, J2EE or .NET) that delivers the same features-to-price ratio that we do, and with the 10.1.3 release, we're raising that bar an order of magnitude higher.
We hope you'll be impressed with the results, despite its extended "gestation" period. We're as excited to get an early access release into your hands as hopefully you will be to give it a spin and give us feedback on.