Of course I did notice it but is ‘bad’ notice as good as all that? There’s another thing for developers like myself that your ‘marketing’ (and this includes writing comments on blogs ) has to overcome: and that is a lot of us generally see the whole integrated tooling < -> framework < -> server stack as being inherently a bad thing. I know that CTOs who sign the orders might be fooled by such a pitch, but most of the savvy experienced developers I know will tend to shy away from these types of solutions for what I believe are good reasons (for a start, development tooling is not a decision a CTO – or anyone who doesn’t have to eat the dog food served up – should ever make!). I believe that lot of this tight integration (and even GUI builders in general) gets in the way of modern agile engineering disciplines like TDD and pair-programming and the like, and in my experience it certainly plays true.

You need to start to show your customers – take it very seriously – that the frameworks can be used with the unix command-line, and typical tools like maven or ant, in modern build environments with agile processes and engineering methods. I mean, before you launch any new development technology, go out of your way to get someone to write a short chapter that looks directly as these factors. Consider Oracle’s BPEL technology – in my opinion a total failure at any of that; it’s a hideous technology, a conceptual dead-end in my view because it just can’t conform into such discipline.

Also, I don’t want to single out Oracle either; IBM is typically just as bad.

The next step is to actually try the technology to get a better understanding of how it works.

I agree that we can do a better job delivering more materials that show the usage of ADF Faces without the rest of the Oracle stack.

But it will probably always end up being a second priority for us, after we show you how to use the technology on the Oracle platform.

For the technical points:
Tomcat – the instructions actually show you how to deploy more than just ADF Faces on Tomcat. The also include deployment of ADF Business Components and the ADF Binding (the other parts of the ADF framework – you can choose to use them or not).
The reason we put them in the main lib directory is so they’ll become shared libraries and not application specific – for better memory usage I guess.

Central Maven repository – on our to-do list. Right now some of our customers use their own Maven repositories.

IDE Value != IDE popularity.
The survey I pointed to ranked the satisfaction of users from their IDE – and there we beat both myEclipse and Sun’s tools. IntelliJ didn’t make the cut since there weren’t enough users to have a statistically meaningful results.

Eclipse – we do support developers who choose to use Eclipse – and as strategic members we are doing a lot of work to make sure they can leverage the Oracle platform. We lead the JPA and JSF projects for Eclipse. We created database tooling. We head the EclipsLink JPA offering and more.
(and we also offer an Oracle Eclipse packaging – OEPE – http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/enterprise-pack-for-eclipse/index.html

At the end of the day we would love it if developers like you will take the Oracle offering for a test drive – whether you like the marketing or not – the thing we would like to be judged on is the actual technology .

The Tomcat instructions seem to assume JDeveloper. But luckily it lists all the relevant jars. But you tell the developer to copy them all to ${CATALINA_HOME}/lib (and you’ve assumed Windows also). Is it really necessary to have all those jars in the server’s classloader context and not in the application’s context at WEB-INF/lib? The JBOSS tutorial is exactly the same.

Is that list of jar files the full set of transient dependencies? There’s a lot of strange jars there. Or is it tied to the specific tutorial that is being built? It’s not quite a full set of fully portable instructions is it? It should chapter 2 of your user manual.

Do you provide Maven repositories?

In the Free-IDE value wars, the problem is you’ve come in third to Eclipse and Netbeans. If you include non-free ones you are fourth behind IntellliJ IDEA. As far as I can tell, that’s the market. I thought Oracle was going to be developing with the Eclipse platform anyway? You are a “strategic member” of the foundation!?

If Oracle wants to speak to developers like me, and you’ll have inherited a few of us via your purchase of Weblogic, then you better start listening that we want to see the plain-vanilla deployment possibilities supported as part of the materials that “sell” us to the technology. Otherwise we are not sold!

Want to deploy ADF Faces on Tomcat?
Here are the instructions:
http://blogs.oracle.com/dana/2009/01/how_to_deploy_a_11g_adf_applic_1.html

Maybe you want to deploy on JBoss?
Here are more instructions:
http://blogs.oracle.com/jruiz/2009/01/deploying_an_adf_11g_applicati.html

If you are more of a code monkey then a visual oriented developer and you don’t want to see the visual UI? Click the source tab in JDeveloper and code your JSF manually – we’ll give you the code completion, code insight and refactoring you need.
And the nice thing is that you can switch between the two views and they are always in synch.

You mention that you don’t know of developers that like JDeveloper – strange.
When Evans did a survey of developers satisfaction with their tools they found a lot of people liked JDeveloper – it was the top rated Free IDE there.
See:
http://blogs.oracle.com/shay/2008/06/who_provides_the_best_ide_valu.html

Shay
(Non-objective JDeveloper/ADF PM)