Thursday 6 March 2008

The JDev vs Apex vs Forms wars continue - now in print!

About a year ago I started a mini Internet war on which was the best Oracle development tool: JDeveloper or Apex or Forms; in the following blog post: A career path for Oracle developers - consider JDeveloper!

This was followed by a number comments and posts by Apex bloggers including Patrick Wolf, John Scott and Dimitri Gielis.

Whether you agree or not with the outcome of these discussions the topic certainly hit a nerve and is still a popular point of contention and discussion in Oracle circles.

In the famous words of Kim Jong-Il "can't we all just get along?", a number of Oracle specialists worked together to publish "The Oracle development tool review" article looking at the pros and cons of Apex, Forms and JDeveloper, to help readers decide the relative merits of each tool, in particular what they are suited to.

This article has been published in the UKOUG OracleScene Q1-2008 issue and is also scheduled for print in the Q2 IOUG Select magazine. Hopefully you're lucky enough to be a member of one of these organisations and can pick up a copy of the relevant magazine.

Very special thanks on my part must go to Grant Ronald for driving through the format of the article and providing sage advice, Wilfred van der Deijl for his input on Oracle Forms, John Stegeman for his assistance with the JDeveloper section, and Penny Cookson for the Apex section. All these people delivered a timely response to the article that allowed us to publish.

In addition thanks must go to John Scott, Dimitri Gielis, Bill Ferguson and Patrick Wolf for their contributions behind the scenes, and the UKOUG and IOUG editors and staff for their assistance on publishing this article. There's also thanks to a number of other Oracle staff who helped review the article but will remain nameless, and I'm sure I forgot somebody, so thanks to you to :)

Amazingly the original blog post was March 2007 and the final articles published in March 2008. This shows great patience, persistence and faith from all of those above and I think a great recommendation on how the Oracle community is willing to work together even though they have different opinions. Well done.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just found your original posting whilst googling for ideas for my development plan.

It's a pity that the article is only available to members of UKOUG & IOUG as I'm not a member of either; it might have helped me with my dev plan as APEX is my chosen direction.

Kind regards

Johannes

Chris Muir said...

That's why I'm a strong advocate of joining user groups Johannes, there's plenty more excellent content available besides the internet. User groups require your support like you require there's.

CM.

Anonymous said...

Tx Chris, I'll make work of joining a user group asap.

Erik Trip - Darwin IT Professionals said...

Chris
Is there any chance you will cover this article in another oracle user group than UKOUG and IOUG for example ODTUG. I just convinced my boss that I needed the membership of odtug and the dutch oracle user group (OGH/OBUG).....

I followed these discussions with great interest.

Chris Muir said...

Hi Erik

Unfortunately ODTUG decided not to go with this article. I'd be happy to submit the article to the Dutch Oracle User Group if you can forward any details thanks.

CM.