Choosing an Edition for Developers

When choosing which edition to use for development you need to consider a wide variety of factors.

Consider Application Requirements

The first factor to consider is just how many of the value-added features of the chosen production environment your application will be using. If you have a team of developers who are building an application that relies heavily on functionality specific to Oracle 10g AS, then it would probably be a wise idea to give developers the same edition for developing that you intend to use in production. In this case you should avoid the temptation to provide a single development server for the entire development team. Each developer needs to be free to work on code independently of changes made by other team members . If your developers only have OC4J on their workstations and are relying on access to a shared server for application-critical features, you'll likely come across numerous clashes as developers refactor, debug, and improve code.

On the flip side, if you're building an application that's based solely on J2EE standards, or a mix of J2EE standards and open -source libraries and frameworks, then you would probably be best served by choosing OC4J. The biggest benefit of OC4J is that it's simple for a developer to manage independently of the administrator. There's no complex installation, no interaction with the Oracle Infrastructurejust a small ZIP file and a completely platform-independent, 100 percent Java container. As a Linux user Erin has a particular fondness for OC4J because its pure Java nature allows her to run it unhindered on her SuSE laptop.

There is of course a happy medium between the two different extremes that's much more likely to appear in a real-world scenario. In many cases the choice to use 10g AS will be based on the availability of a certain feature or features. In this case it may still be possible to use OC4J on the developer workstations, since it may be possible to defer the integration of proprietary features such as Single Sign-On and Web Caching, until the end of the project. Alternatively, it may be that you can limit the interaction with the proprietary features to a particular developer or small group of developers, in which case a shared-server approach might be acceptable.

In the end this is a common-sense decision and you need to choose the solution that best fits your development environment.

Consider Developer Experience

It's also important to consider the developer experience when choosing which edition of 10g AS to develop against. If you're expecting your development teams to work with an edition of the application server that makes it difficult for them to do their job and causes their productivity to drop, then expect to have an angry group of coders banging on your door!

This is perhaps the hardest factor to gauge, as it depends greatly on your knowledge of your development team. If your development team is just you then you're quite fortunate, but chances are that you will not be that lucky and you'll have to take everyone's needs into consideration.

OC4J is a simple option for developers. It provides them with all the required J2EE functionality with a minimal amount of fuss. A developer will have no problem maintaining his own OC4J installationthis may not be true of either Java Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition.

The Java Standard and Enterprise Editions will obviously take up more memory on a developer workstation, and this may cause noticeable slowdown on under-configured machines. This problem may be compounded if your developers run other memory or CPU- intensive applications on their machines. However, on an adequately equipped machine, the performance hit will be negligible. Perhaps the most important difference for developers is the difference in startup time. On a sample Pentium 4 2.5 GHz machine with 1.5 GB RDRAM, OC4J takes approximately 2 seconds to startup, whereas the Java edition of 10g takes 12 to 14 secondsup to six and seven times longer. When you stop and start the application server regularly during the day this can be an annoying inconvenience.

Your decision in this area will be based on which environment your developers are more comfortable working in. If your developers prefer to have Enterprise Edition running on their local machines, then let them. However, if they only want to use OC4J, then you should strive to facilitate this.

Setting Up the Development Environment

The development edition that you choose may have an impact on how you set up the development environment. Many companies like to promote standardized configurations for their machines, but Erin prefers to allow developers to customize workstation configurations to their likingthat way they can work in an environment that's both comfortable and familiar.

If you decide to use OC4J for development then the installation process is trivial and you can pretty much leave the developers to set up their own machines.

Note 

If you're unfamiliar with Oracle 10g AS installation, you should check out Chapters 3, 15, and 16, where installation is covered in full for OC4J and the full editions.

However, if you're using Java Standard or Enterprise Edition you may wish to produce a standard base workstation installation using a tool such as Norton Ghost. This way you reduce the administration burden for the development environment, and you can quickly recover an installation if one of the machines becomes corrupted.

In summary, choosing an edition of 10g AS to use for development purposes is an important one and can have a large impact on the development of your application. Use the previous recommendations as a guideline, but your decision should also be based around what is best for your project and your team.