Workspace studio IDE Vs OSB Web Console

Question

When to use OSB Web Based console and when to use Workbench studio - what are pros and cons - and what is the benefit of one over the other.
Also, which is better in Software Development Life Cycle like building the code and then deploying on the server etc.
Thanks
AB
Edited by: AAB on May 27, 2010 7:43 PM

Answer 1

From a developer perspective we have chosen for the approach of using workshop and deploying locally. We still have a development server to do some more thoroughly testing. But there are some limitations when using a single development server for all your developers, you can for example have only one debug session/connection. More than one person deploying all their code changes (with bugs) directly on one server will not be a very workable situation either.
When you use workshop you have a environment better suited for developers. You can use a code respository to checkin/checkout your project. Editing your message flows is much user friendlier. In the web frontend this is not an easy task. When you edit a flow in the web console you need to do this within a session. When you are developing this does not work very nice. You want to do your changes more quickly and not to be slowed down by this kind of things. The web console to my opinion is better suited for administrators and configurators.
Of course there are some disadvantages to the workshop. For plain development of the services with limited additional requirements to implement concerning security and so on it works. But some more complex configurations can only be done in the web console. For example if you want to add basic authentication to a business service I could only do that in the web console. I currently do not have a list of all these things. But if you look at the editable fields etc. in the web console these are more extensive than in workshop.
Futhermore the workshop is sometimes a little buggy. Copying project and resources does not always work. It crashes sometimes and I even had colluegues that corrupted their project just using the workshop. I have not experienced that yet. So expect to run into some weird unexplainable behaviour once in a while. Restaring workshop or deleting your local server and creating a new one usually fixes a lot of these problems.
Last but not least it is not known (to me) yet what will happen to workshop in the (near) future. It is still supported in the 11g version but I expect oracle will try to get everybody use JDeveloper. So bug fixing in the workshop might be not their number one priority. So it could also mean that workshop will not implement all new features of OSB in the long run forcing people to siwtch to JDeveloper in the end. But that is just a thing I am guessing as I am more of an eclipse fan than a JDeveloper fan ;-) The web console will always be there so if you do not want to invest in learning workshop it is the safest choice. But developing in it and versioning your code in a respository becomes more of a challenge.