A bit of history

Many of the articles I plan will illustrate some of the challenges we have faced moving to JDeveloper and ADF/FMW.  In order to give appropriate context, I feel that a quick background of where we came from is in order.

First a bit of history.  We came from an Eclipse based stack of tools.  We opted for the commercially available (and very reasonably priced) MyEclipse Professional package from Genuitec.  This gave us a good stack to start with standard JEE development, including Web Services, EJBs, and Struts.

As time went on, we adopted JSF to replace Struts, abandoned EJB 2.x by replacing the business layer with web services.  Eventually we also adopted the Spring IoC container to help with some of the container management we lost with the move to Web Services.

In addition, we grew our stack to also include some additional tools.  At the time of switch, we were running the following:

• Java 6 (JRockit) with JEE 5 on Weblogic Server
• MyEclipse Professional 10.6 (using the Pulse engine to ensure configurations are consistent across developer machines)
• PMD - for static analysis of code smells, bugs and bad programming practices.
• Checkstyle - for static analysis of code style standards adherence
• Ant - for building the software packages and enforcing certain parts of our release process (for example to make certain that code is tagged before a release is cut and that manifest files are updated with proper version information).  We were going to start doing more continuous integration, automated delivery and automated dependency management, and were contemplating a switch to Maven before the switch.