Java Development Tools

Greetings,

This is a recurrent question that I'm asking since 7 years, since I started working with WebLogic. At that time the current version was the 5th one. BEA have bought/integrated sompe tools which name I completelly forgot and which were supposed to be used with WebLogic, but I never tried them as they worked only very partially.

Starting with the 6th version and continuing with 7 and 8 version, my development tool for application using WebLogic was JBuilder. At one moment, there even was a JBuilder for WebLogic release ! But while JBuilder was able to give you access of all j2ee features of WebLogic, one couldn't take advantage of things as WebLogic Portal and WebLogic Integration. Enter Workshop. I used this tools with WebLogic 8 1 or 2 years and I was satisfied. In 2005, BEA has decided to migrate Workshop to Eclipse and the new release became really operational only a couple of yers latter. But well, it worked with WebLogic Server/Portal 9, AquaLogic, etc.

Now, after 7 or 8 years of experience with WebLogic, I came back to my initial question : what development tool for WebLogic ? I'm using Oracle Workshop for most of tasks but it's hard to develop EJB 3/JPA stuff with it. I'm not familiar with JDeveloper and, since I know that the trend is to have Eclipse based IDE, I'm not sure wether it is worth digging into it. Anyway, the some few tests I tried weren't successfully (I don't remember what exactly but I didn't succeed to develop a TopLink Essentials JPA test). I tried OEPE 11G which I wanted to plug into my Ganymede install but after having lhad ots of conflicts, I got up. I tried the all-in release and I discovered that I cannot update it online (it takes ages despite my fast network connection) and that it is not able to use WebLogic 10.3 but only 10.0. The only IDE that I can use with WebLogic 10.3 is NetBeans 6.5. But it also has some problems in starting/stopping the WebLogic 10.3 and dependencies have to be handled manually, which is a pain for complex projects.

Accordingly, my conclusion is quite said: after so many years since WebLogic exists, after having had very good development tools, we come now at a moment where one doesn't really know any more what software development tool to use with WebLogic, as none seems to work properly enough.

Kind regards,

Nicolas