Thanks for posting, and for the honest appraisal of the previous Sequence modeler and the offer to contribute feedback. It’s nice to see that the JDeveloper team is open to suggestions and feature requests!

I finally got around to downloading JDeveloper for OS X today, and will be using it over the next few weeks, so expect to see some feedback posted on the site as I get my head wrapped around it. I’m also beginning our evaluation of Rational next week, so we’ll be doing something of a side-by-side. I’m not sure that I’ll be using Rational’s RSA tool for UML modeling just yet, but I should be hitting that in the upcoming months, which will present the opportunity for a true comparison to the UML support in JDeveloper.

- max

I am the developer for the UML support in JDeveloper, most recently I put together the Sequence modeler. (Which is much better than in preview as that was something of a lemon).

I would be interesting in any areas of the UML you would like to see improved. As you have noted we don’t have the bredth of Rational, instead we want to focus on the core UML modelers that provide the most benefit to the most users.

If you have time to get in touch I would be interested to hear your comments,

Thanks,

Gerard Davison
(Gerard.Davison@oracle.com)

Thanks for your comments. Yes, you are correct – we saw JDeveloper 10.1.2. One of our developers had downloaded the 10.1.3 preview release, and ended up going back to the 10.1.2 release relatively quickly (to give you some indication of his perception of the quality of the preview release)…

That being said, we’re pretty agnostic to development environments now that JDeveloper and Eclipse are both free, so it’s a bit of a no-brainer. My recommendation to our developers will be to code with the tool that they are most comfortable with, since it seems that they both have the features that our developers will need to be productive – and that’s the most important feature of all.

- max

More here: http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev/101

Thanks for the info – I had not heard of Fyracle before.

The issue isn’t so much us leaving Oracle as a database, but more us potentially leaving Oracle as an app server too – or at least having some choice. Oracle makes an incredible database, and I highly recommend it if you can afford it. I can’t see us leaving Oracle’s RDBMS platform ever, unless cash flow ever became an issue (and since we’re in the real estate business, that’s unlikely to ever be the case). Of course, that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to maintain the option to switch databases if I ever felt like taking it. You never know what the future holds, especially in our industry…

One of our stumbling blocks at the moment is that so much of our application infrastructure is based on Oracle Forms, which are extremely tightly coupled to Oracle’s database – even down to specific database version numbers.

We’ve been fighting an uphill battle for several years to upgrade one of our largest Forms applications to more recent versions of Oracle’s database and application server. Since the Forms version on the application is old, it’s only compatible with the older database versions, and feature implementations are not always forward compatible. In essence, we end up re-testing the entire app with each upgrade, which is a huge effort.

We have a phenomenal DBA team, though, and they have Oracle 10g (both database and app server) on the horizon. If we can get all of our software running in a dedicated business tier, then our choice of database (and its current version) will become more of a non-issue. The worst thing that could happen is we’d have to run our unit tests against our data access tier and identify anomalies. The nice thing is, if we do it right the first time, testing our entire data tier will consist of a few hours of automated JUnit testing, followed by punch and pie. :)

- max

how’s the kiosk thing coming?

sean