Andrej Koelewijn

Another milestone of Eclipse has just been released: 3.1M1. (New and Noteworthy).

Eclipse has many features that i wish the jdeveloper team would copy: viewing files and folders in the application navigator, double click on a tab to maximize it, refactorings, etc, etc, etc. Many of these features will be in the next release of jdeveloper, which is good.

But I just realised that the best thing the jdeveloper team could copy from the eclipse team is not one of the features in the IDE. I wish jdeveloper would adopt eclipse’s release schedule. There’s a new version of eclipse about every 2 months. The wait for a new version of jdeveloper is a lot longer. I wouldn’t mind having some bug fixes and new features earlier. Ofcourse, Eclipse’s milestones are officially all alpha and beta quality, but from my experience they have been pretty good, and i don’t mind using a milestone for production work. If it doesn’t work, you can always switch back to the latest stable release.

I attended an session on Toplink last week, organized by Amis. Lucas Jellema has written a very complete summary of the evening on the Amis Weblog: Expert Session on Persistency Framework: Toplink.

The most usefull information of the evening for me was Peter Ebell’s demonstration that Toplink’s Query Expressions can be a lot easier to write than complex sql queries. I haven’t used Toplink yet, but i’ve used Hibernate. But i didn’t use Hibernate’s criteria queries, which are similar to Toplinks query expressions. Instead i used the hibernate query language. Next time i’ll probably have another look at the criteria queries, although hibernate’s documentation states that currently criteria queries aren’t as powerfull as HQL. Hopefully that’ll improve in the future.

Oracle just released a dvd which will let you try Oracle on Linux (Red Hat and SuSE). It uses vmware, so you can run linux on your window machine. Somehow i feel a solution based on something like knoppix would have been better, but it’s nice to see Oracle’s ongoing support for Linux.