Oracle's JDeveloper 11g IDE

Question

Has anyone else played around with Oracle's JDeveloper IDE? I just found it today and decided to give it a whirl to see what their software is like. I have to say that it's pretty pathetic. Here's what I noticed in the 10 minutes that I tried to use it:
1) It's not intuitive at all.
2) It's uber slow. And it's not my machine. I'm on a pretty beefy lenovo (4GB RAM, Intel dual core 2.16GHz) running Ubuntu. (Speaking of beefy lenovos, my dream machine is shipping tomorrow: Lenovo Thinkpad w500, 8GB RAM, dual core 3.04GHz ... blah blah blah)
3) The default color scheme just hurts your eyes. It's like that nasty blue default Windows XP theme ... remember that? Everything is a really weird off-colored blue.
4) Creating a project takes a long time. What kind of project, what technologies would you like to use (you actually have to select java and add it to the "used technologies" list). I found it interesting that one of the listed technologies was: "SOA." <-- WTF?!?! (Methinks Oracle is less technology-oriented and much more business-oriented.)
5) It tries to be like Eclipse, but fails pretty miserably. (perhaps it's even based on Eclipse - I don't know. I've used NetBeans for most of my development and have only recently (last week or so) played with Eclipse to amount to anything.) My previous experience with eclipse has been bad to fair at best, but JDeveloper - on a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being usable 0 being horrible - would receive a -22.
6) Did I mention that it's terribly slow? And to compound the issue, you have to go through an eight-step wizard just to start a simple "hello world" Java project. (I only wish that I were kidding.)
7) Right-clicking on the default package and navigating to the <new> menu, you don't get the options you'd expect. Instead, it's something sort-of like eclipse, but not as robust. They've taken the Microsoft: "I know better than you what you do and don't want to do in this project." I.e., you can't just add an empty java file. You have to go through their add-class/add-interface/add-enum wizard (which also seems to be based (at least partially) on eclipse.)
8) The interface is really busy and cluttered. It's very difficult to try to focus on something. They have way too much going on. (Yeah, that's likely configurable.) I thought that eclipse was bad, but this is eclipse X 50. Seriously. They have dozens of tabs, status windows, toolbars, toolkits, toolboxes, project and solution explorers, tips and tricks, debuggers, profilers, etc. windows everywhere.
9) This should perhaps be 8b. Like I said - they have way too much going on. I like a simple, bare-bones IDE. Let me add in the extra shiit when and where I want.
10) It's sllooooowwwwww NetBeans isn't the quickest tool out there, but I've never been negatively effected by its speed. (And, as I said, I've only recently begun to play with Eclipse and it is by no means slow.)
When I had initially heard about Oracle buying Sun, I was very pleased. I knew they had a good business reputation, but hadn't heard much about their technology reputation. I had heard some really good things about Oracle DB, so I figured that - in general - they were pretty solid technically. Perhaps they are, but after having played with this piece of junk and having read about the Oracle OpenWhatever conference - where the primary goal was to sell the technically inept business weenies on their products - I'm starting to have some really serious doubts. Companies that throw around meaningless buzzwords to technical people make me sick (and in this case worry me just a tad).
Anyone else worked with some of Oracle's products (preferably Java products)? Is this feeling in the pit of my stomach justified (or should I not have eaten that bean burrito for lunch)?

Answer 1

BalusC wrote:
You want an IDE? You want a free one? Go for Eclipse. You want to pay? Go for IntelliJ IDEA.Not looking for an IDE - I already use NetBeans and am quite please with it. (Also note that I do 0 (as in absolutely none) web development.) I've been tinkering with Eclipse the past few days (I try once every couple of months to see if I can convince myself to like it) and it's catching on a bit more this time than other times. We'll see how it plays out.
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As to Oracle products, I've ever tried JDeveloper a couple of years ago and like Netbeans I threw it away after some minutes of trying. It was in no way better than Eclipse for webdevelopment.From my limited experience, I'd say that eclipse is significantly better.
I've taken a quick glance at their ADF JSF component library, but I didn't have the feeling that it was any better than the Sun standard implementation.No better, but any worse?
I've read a lot about Oracle DB server and have at times the chance to play with it. It is certainly a robust database, but I have too often create a friggin trigger or a stored procedure for it while other RDBMS'es have builtin functions for that (autoincrement PK, limit/offset of results, insert-or-update query, etcetera).That's really interesting. I've half a mind to download their free, tinker database just to see what all the fuss is about. I've only really worked with two DB servers: MS SQL Server and MySql, the former being significantly better in my opinion.
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No, I don't like Oracle. It's only their marketing team which is top.The more I look into them and read about their history and see what technical people have to say about their products, the more uneasy I am becoming. I haven't written them off yet, though. What Sun products needed was marketing, which is something that Oracle is very obviously good at. If you can combine the quality of Sun engineering with Oracle's marketing abilities, I think you may very well have an unbeatable combination. The nagging question for me at this point is how much of an influence Oracle is going to have on the technical and engineering aspects of Sun.