Here I am again trying to make sense of JDeveloper for an upcoming project. This is the third attempt at using Jdeveloper in a real project since 2003.
However, it seems to me like Jdeveloper is in a perpetual state of change and each version (with its own strange numbering system) brings its lot of deprecated features and new ones that no one seem to know what to make of.
Every Forms developer knows that the last three major versions are 6i, 9i and 10g but with JDeveloper, you really don't know which one is the latest and worse which one to commit to. For real world projects, it is not the technical guys that make the decisions on the tools to use for development and the business guys need to be given specific infos on the whys for selecting tool A against tool B. So what to say when the same tool has release after release and upgrades from one to the other is not guaranteed.
I downloaded both JDev 11g TP3 and version 10g 10.1.3.1 with the tutorial for Forms developers. At any rate, it was clearly mentioned that the tutorial was for version 10g. However, I tried to use it with version 11g TP3 but it was a real mess since a lot of stuff was changed from 10g to the TP3 one.
I truly believe that Oracle should adopt the same strategy as they do with Forms. That is, release a new version of the tool only when it is really stable and make improvements in the feature set without a major change in the development workflow. The reason is that developers get used to a certain way of handling the tool but if the new version completely changes the UI (or workflow), the developers get really confused and will have a tendency to go back to the old version.
This is just some of my thinking as we already embarked on a massive migration project from Forms 6i to Forms 10g. Sorry JDeveloper but may be next time, we will take a look again and see whether it is worth adopting you.
JDeveloper 11g TP3