Strategies for Development

It would take another book to discuss this topic fully, but there are a few considerations for development strategy that are important to discuss here. First, how will developers actually build the application? Will they use an IDE such as Borland's JDeveloper or JBuilder? Will they use a simple text editor such as vi or emacs along with command-line compiler? Will they use shell scripts or Apache Ant for the build process?

Many shops will try to place constraints on what software their developers use to build software, but we find this to be extremely counterproductive. Developers tend to be very familiar with one or two IDEs or editors and will have a cursory knowledge of a few others. Although any good developer will be able to familiarize herself with a new IDE or editor within hours, she will not be at her most productive for considerably longer than that.

So while Oracle JDeveloper 10g might be considered a natural choice when building applications for Oracle 10g AS, each member of your team will probably be best served using the environment with which he or she is most familiar.

Note 

Since this book focuses on 10g AS, we won't go into too much detail on JDeveloper. However you should check out Harshad Oak's Oracle JDeveloper 10g (Apress) for a full discussion on the use of JDeveloper for developing J2EE applications.

If your teams want to use JDeveloper, then let them. If they want to use IntelliJ, Eclipse, or SlickEdit, let them. We advise that you don't place too much stock on the integration between JDeveloper and 10g AS. Features such as the ability to debug applications running inside a 10g AS container are nice additions to JDeveloper, but they're available in other IDEs as well.

Note 

If you're using JBuilder, then you can download a plug-in for 10gAS from the Oracle website at http://otn.oracle.com/software/products/ias/htdocs/utilsoft.html . Eclipse users should check out MyEclipse ( www.myeclipseide.com ), which has Connectors for a wide variety of application servers, including Oracle 10g AS.

You should also be wary of relying too much on in-container debugging and unit testing. If you're unable to debug and test the majority of application functionality separate from the container, then you should consider refactoring your code to enable this.

Choosing how to build the application is also an important consideration. We find that it's best to make the build process as structured and standard as possible. Allowing different developers to use different build methods can lead to disaster because you have different configurations and builds of the same application floating around in your environment. For this purpose we prefer to use Apache Ant ( http://ant.apache.org ), which provides predefined tasks for most of the actions needed to build an application. We've also found it useful to automate the starting and stopping of the application server using the <java> task in Ant.