Tuesday, February 5, 2008

JDeveloper 11g Jumps the Shark

I stopped using Eclipse about a year and a half ago because the performance (on a reasonably performant Mac) was just too abysmal. I then spent a month trying other IDEs (the free ones, at least - I'm cheap), and eventually settled on JDeveloper. It's not the best, but it had enough of what I needed - which is basically just Java editing and code complete. I really don't need all the crap they shove into all IDEs these days. Most importantly, it didn't take 30 seconds every time I wanted to switch edit buffers.

At that time JDeveloper was at version 10.3.something. About six or so months ago they started releasing the 11g technology previews of the IDE. I did notice a performance hit when running, as Oracle has started adding more and more features. But now (as of December), the third release of JDeveloper's tech preview was released, and I dropped my jaw when I saw the download size: nearly 700 MB. Honestly, the 10.x release was about one-fourth (maybe one-third) of that. After seeing that behemoth download, I realized my days with JDeveloper are almost over. With that much new code/bloat, there's no way it's going to be any more performant - my initial criteria. Yes, there may may be many new, nifty features - that all support Oracle's business, I understand this. And yes, it is a free IDE, so I get what I pay for. But even for hardcore Oracle users/shops, this upgrade just looks painful.

After this experience, I am considering going back to Eclipse, but there isn't any Solaris x86 build (except the 3.2 version on blastwave.org). Not that running on Solaris is a must, but it's what I've running on lately. Oh well, time to slum and try NetBeans, once again :).

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Glad you like JDeveloper (well enough). :-) For the 11g previews, Oracle is only putting out the Studio edition, which is the all-inclusive packaging, including ADF, BPEL, WebCenter, etc. We're still planning to release the lighter-weight bundles as well. (In the nightly builds, the Java Edition is still under 50MB.) Even though the previews just have the big Studio download, you can use one of the other roles (Java or J2EE) when you start JDev. Selecting one of those roles will disable a bunch of extension/functionality, so you should be able to get back similar performance to the 10.1.3 Java or J2EE edition experience.

-- Brian (JDeveloper Product Management)

Jason Brown said...

That sounds great, Brian. The 700MB download just seems brutal. I'll be happy to start playing with the roles - but I'm staying on tech preview 2.