Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Oracle JDeveloper as JSF Editor

After trying out various IDEs for editing Java Server Faces (JSF) files, I have finally settled on Oracle's JDeveloper as the best tool for the purpose. I had assumed that JDeveloper would insist on using ADF, but found to my pleasant surprise that it also allows you to design standard JSF pages in a visual manner. Unlike Sun Java Studio Creator which creates its own backing bean class, JDeveloper gives you full control, and lets you decide whether you want all/some/none of your UI components to be in your backing bean.

The Java IDE marketplace is such that no single tool meets all your needs. I find Eclipse is good for general purpose Java programming but not much use for J2EE stuff. Netbeans doesn't work for me - I have tried to use it several times but each time I have given up in frustration because I either cannot resolve some wierd error, or cannot get the IDE to do something simple. To give you an example, I try to edit a JSF file in Netbeans, and it will show code completion for jsp tags, but not for JSF. I don't have the time to work out why.

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