Re: Oracle: Naked King in database land?

Following up on Mikito Harakiri, 05 Apr 2003:

> XWindow based? Sure. But you have to realize that it was the market that
> created by MSWindows that sparkled real tools vendors competition and
> innovation.

Don't confuse your lack of familiarisation with Unix IDE environments with stagnation of the same. The two are not equivalent. As for the competition and innovation: I have yet to see where it is. Quite frankly, most of the IDEs in Windoze suck bug time. They are OK if all you do is use pre-coded examples and "canned" demos. If you have to do real development work, they get in the way big time. I know: I used VisualC and VisualC++ for a long time. Gave up on the stuff and went back to good old Zortech C and Watcom C.

> FYI Oracle licenced JBuilder code initially -- smart move, as they didn't
> have established presence in the tools business.

And that makes Oracle inefficient and "old technology", eh? Quite frankly, if they are grown up enough to fast track their entry into a market with a top tool, I say: all the better for them!

> JDeveloper is better than JBullder today (their codebases grow apart to the
> point where JDeveloper 5.0 was a complete, all java rewrite), then, I don't
> know.

Try the latest versions of JDeveloper. It's still slow, but darn good now. Haven't used it yet for anything serious, but what I've seen works well.

I still find it gets in the way after a while, but that BC4J stuff really simplifies web development.

And let's face it: there is NOTHING simple about J2EE and .NET web development nowadays: the darn things are absolute MONSTERS of complexity!

> I would suspect however, that Borland doesn't make such an assh**e
> moves like suddenly dropping lightweight Tomkat servlet engine and starting
> bundling the tool with this Application Server monster.

Neither did Oracle. As I said: try the latest JDev. It's quite lightweight and uses third party bundled app servers. Very efficient. Of course you can get it with 9iAS, but you better have the iron to run it then! But if all you want is to develop stuff standalone, it can do so very quickly and efficient.

> Just compare TOAD, SQLNav to OEM.

Chief: OEM should be compared to nothing. It's an abortion of a product, always was from day one. Designed by comittee, what do you expect?

With apologies to the defenders of the thing here, but I really think it's a "user-friendly" disaster. Even the DB2 Java front-end beats the crap out of OEM...

> Then, take Oracle Forms. Do you need any
> more examples?
>

Forms is actually quite an old product. I was talking about newer stuff. JDev is one. There is more.

But you are right: Oracle is a database company primarily. I don't expect them to develop best-of-breed gui development tools. Provided I can use their database with the best tools, I'm happy.

Pity SQL*Windows (from Gupta) went down the tubes, now THAT was a good tool! Yeah, I know: it's called Centura now, but it's not the same.

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au.nospam