We will be developing a new web site for a client who already has a Kentico 8.2 license. I am trying to make a case for developing the site using Kentico 9. Some key features I have found so far include:
faster performance (how much in real-world terms?)
better integration with .Net MVC
content staging tasks can be synchronized per user account
better rollback functionality: previously we had to make full database backups, content staging in Kentico 8.2 causes issues for restoring previous versions of a page.
built in source control support for GIT
It looks like Kentico integration with the client's existing database may be possible. Has anyone done this? What are the limitations or caveats?
Is there a discount for upgrading the license from 8.2 to 9?
Thanks in advance for your feedback!
faster performance (how much in real-world terms?)
there are major (official) improvements for content and contact management
better integration with .Net MVC
there is whole new way to develop sites using ASP.NET MVC with Kentico
content staging tasks can be synchronized per user account
there is pretty good blogpost describing new staging improvements
better rollback functionality: previously we had to make full database
backups, content staging in Kentico 8.2 causes issues for restoring
previous versions of a page.
I am not sure what do you mean by new rollback functionality
built in source control support for GIT
you might confused with continuous integration feature
You can find release notes with all new features and improvements here.
It looks like Kentico integration with the client's existing database
may be possible. Has anyone done this? What are the limitations or
caveats?
there is tested upgrade utility for upgrading to Kentico 9
Is there a discount for upgrading the license from 8.2 to 9?
for pricing you should definitely contact Kentico sales department
See the answer I posted on the DevNet (which by the way, no need to cross-post on both)
If they have a license for 8.2, is their maintenance current? If so, simply go to the client portal and upgrade it for free. This can be done without any cost. Either way, the licensing cost doesn't come from the version, it comes from the type (base, ultimate, ems, etc.).
So assuming they purchased their license about a year ago, their maintenance should be current or close to current and you either get current on your maintenance or just go to the client portal and see if it will allow you to upgrade your license and get a new key for v9.
If they don't have the site built, there is no reason to build it on v8.2 at all.
Can I use Glassfish 4.0 which is open source and the production/enterprise glassfish hasn't released yet in Production.
I just did small app using java ee 7, and I want to deploy it in production.
Thanks
Ratna
It depends on what are the needs and practices in your organization. The Open Source edition has a final release and is certified as JAVA EE7 compliant. So it's good for production use in a sense. If you keep to standards and best practices, you shouldn’t have any problems.
Don't know how the question with frameworks is...
However if you are in need of support, you're stuck to the Glassfish community/Google/StackOverflow. That's where the Enterprise edition makes a difference - you're essentially paying for the same product (with a little bit of add-ons), but mainly for Oracle's support.
Microsoft are pushing their ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tools such as TFS very hard but often gloss over the fact that major features are only available for managed (.Net) code. eg: Intellitrace is c# and VB-only
Are there any benefits to using Lab Management with a pure native application?
We have two major apps, one with a Java UI and the other MFC. There have been suggestions that the Lab Manager will be broadly rolled-out in the company but I have strong doubts that we will gain anything.
According to this March 2011 table of test automation support, Java is not supported and MFC only for basic controls.
[edit] Prior to the latest vNext release, we couldn't use their TestManager for unit tests unless we wrap our C++ code in .Net layers with C++/CLI unit tests.
So it seems that none of the various ways of testing code can be used for our apps.
Absolutely! Lab Management could help out quite a bit for all sorts of non-.NET applications. It's great for setting up development or test environments made up of multiple machines. You can use the data collectors with Microsoft Test Managers to collect rich data from each of the machines in your environments when you are running test cases or performing exploratory testing. Whenever you find a bug, you can file a bug and each of the data collectors on each of the machines in the environment under test will be queried and attached to a pretty nice bug report for you. You can snapshot, rollback, etc. You can automate test runs and deployments of builds to environments.
You can use Lab Management even with shared or dedicated environments per testers. If your environments require it, you could even use network isolation between the environments to make sure clones of the environments don't cause problems with other clones.
Lab Management also helps if you need to test your apps against multiple configurations. Imagine you need to test your MFC or Java app on Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003, etc. You could spin up individual environments with the different configurations and test against each of them appropriately. Microsoft Test Manager can keep track of pass/fail results for your test cases in each of those configurations as well.
You're absolutely right though. Certain data collectors that come out of the box won't work well or not at all with non-.NET applications. However, the data collector system is completely extensible. If there is something you want to automatically gather, you can create your own custom data collector for use in Lab Management.
There's a lot you can take advantage in Lab Management with testing against non-.NET applications.
Unit tests for native C++ are supported in Visual Studio 11 so there is no need for wrappers. see this article. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh270864(v=VS.110).aspx
This is a two part question:
I would like to know where does Oracle ADF 11g stand as a framework to develop / deploy Web / Java EE Applications as compared to other frameworks.
How much is Oracle ADF being used as a framework to Develop Web Applications.
I am asking from a perspective that whether or not there are good job opportunities as an Oracle ADF Developer and what the future looks like for those holding Oracle ADF skills.
Also as Oracle plans to use ADF as core technology for Fusion Applications, Is it good time to build Oracle ADF skills as a siebel developer? As the future Oracle CRM Applications like ERP, SCM will be based on ADF should developers start building ADF skills. Around when will customers start implementing those applications based on ADF. Will these be available On Premise or mostly On Demand in SaaS way.
We have chosen Oracle ADF in our company for one of our projects. Sadly, this proved to be a big mistake. I personally have used Oracle products, in particular their DB, but as far as fusion middleware is concerned, I would advise you to stay away from it. ADF was by far the worst framework I have ever used as an architect. Some of its features I noticed are: very complex, Oracle just "invents" or forces some development approaches that have been proven as a bad practice by the Java community years ago. ADF is very slow compared to other frameworks. With being slow I mean ADF pages run slow. The reason for this is extremely complex generated html and javascript. You can check this by opening up Firebug and inspecting the generated html...it looks like something from the 90s...Terrible. Not to be overly pedantic, but ADF pages have huge amounts of validation errors causing problems in making them run on all browsers. The architecture of ADF is, in my view, messy. Struts2 for example is a much cleaner framework which makes it very easy to integrate it with 3rd party libraries such jQuery, etc. Oracle advocates ADF as an MVC framework but frankly I failed to see the actual MVC architecture there.
ADF uses its own javascript libraries, which are huge, practically impossible to modify, unoptimized and slow in comparison to others such as jQuery or Prototype. The emerging trends in J2EE are lightweight pluggable frameworks that are easily integrated with other tools such a Spring for managing dependencies, jQuery for scripting, CC for continuous integration. ADF is a heavy-weight tightly-integrated framework with other ORacle tools, which makes it very difficult to use it any other way than Oracle devised.
Not to mention the development tools that you are forced to used when developing ADF - the JDeveloper which is very buggy and crashes regularly. Developing in Eclipse is problematic, because ADF has numerous "specific" files which JDeveloper generates automatically.
All in all...ADF was a huge disappointment for us. We spent months messing with it, when finally our client decided the application was too slow and difficult for them to support it and the cancelled it altogether.
Based on my experience i can only say stay away from it. Choose one of the more supported and architecturally clean solutions such as Struts2 or Spring.
I have used JDeveloper 10 and 11, both with ADF, on two enterprise ADF projects for a prominent defense contractor. I agree that ADF is complex, but disagree that JDev crashes frequently, or that the pages are slow to render.
Now... why ADF? Read Oracle's synopsis below, stating that JDeveloper and ADF make Java EE development more accessible to "business" programmers. While this does not guarantee elegant programs, it does almost certainly guarantee that, when these developers get into trouble with ADF, they will probably be utterly lost and will have little idea how to open the hood and reach inside. Conversely, they would be lost even sooner trying to integrate the current J2EE open-source cornucopia.
THE SERMON
Source: ADF Developer's guide (paraphrased)
"Since the early Java days in the late 1990's , the Jave enterprise platform has grown massively and today is used by a large community of developers. However, the developer community is not homogenous and includes developers who are not expert Java programmers, but are business developers who have core competencies in their industries. As the Java EE platform and community grows, the average programmer skill level is declining.
It's hard to imagine that there is a single developer who understands all aspects of the Java EE platform in depth. The problem to address in Java EE is to provide a technology that empowers developers to build cutting edge web and SOA app's without limiting their agility.
Existing Java frameworks such as Struts, Spring, JSF, EJB, GWT, etc are blankets pulled over areas of complexity that expose simpler controls to work with. Using frameworks, developers no longer work with the java core API's but instead interact with interfaces and services exposed by the framework.
Blah, blah, blah...
What seems a small problem for experienced java developers is another hurdle for business developers who are new to java and EE development. This type of developer may turn to a a single dev environment promising integration of all aspects of app development in a single technology chouice. Developers from a 4GL desktop dev background might be attracted by PLSQL, .NET, Adobe Flash.
An experienced Java developer might see this a a big mistake, but how would those developers know, unless Java too provides a single solution for them? The solution is an end-to-end framework which pulls another blanket over the technologies, one that combines different framewokrs and technologies into a single product that exposes visual and declarative development gestures as it's predominant programming methodology... ADF."
I have been working with ADF since last 6 months, and i realise that ADF is made particularly large application with strong database integration. I haven't seen any other Framework which can provide you with so fast and easy development of database rich applications.
Yes i agree that it have some bugs, but still it works well if you know how to work with it.
My perception of and experience with ADF is that it is a very solid and robust framework (unfortunately, the development tools are not.) I'm not sure there's much competition to it, at least, not from a single framework. ADF itself is really several different frameworks combined over the years into a mostly cohesive product. Now that Oracle owns Java, i really expect (hope) parts/much of ADF finds its way into Java EE-proper so we can maybe see alternative implementations and better development tools. If that were to happen, it'd pretty well solidify ADF's future (as long as Oracle doesn't screw the Java community in the meantime and push them to alternative VM platforms).
If you are already familiar with or want to work with Oracle(-related) products, ADF is what you want. Given the market penetration of Oracle, it's probably a reasonable bet that they'll remain dominant and your skills will remain marketable for years to come. Oracle is spending lots of money and acquiring lots of companies to try to own and retain the enterprise.
The SaaS question, to me, is a little harder to answer. While it does seem to be moving in that direction, it's not clear to me if it's mostly marketing's attempt to give it that push or if business-need is driving it. And there are lots of questions i don't really track such as business trust of the cloud for critical data and reliability.
Short answer:
You developing Enterpise solution, your product vendor is Oracle - ADF is a best choice
You indie developer, your solution is not for enterprise, you not going to use other products in the Oracle stack - ADF is not for you, look for another framework.
Long answer:
If you going to Enterprise, if your general product's stack vendor is Oracle. Your best choise is to go along with ADF. ADF becomes better with each major release. I've started using ADF since 11.1.1.2, had a look at 10.x and now using 12.1.3, while still supporting large enterprise applications on 11.1.1.6.
I see a huge improvement and its really hard to find another product that provide better integration and support for whole Oracle stack.
However, if you quite familiar with other framework or/and not going to use other Oracle products and/or your customers can't afford to pay quite a lot for ADF/Weblogic/DB/ECM etc.. - your best choise is to avoid ADF. Its good for large enterprise solutions.
Yes, in fact actually you can develop using free and limited version of ADF - Essentials, use other app server as tomcat or glassfish, but you'll be better off with the other framework. ADF Essentials is only kickstart to large enterprise world, not a solution for small lightweight application.
Development in ADF is a pain in the heart. For a newcomer, the learning curve is too steep. I wish it could be more like learning dot NET.
From my perspective, learning and constructing a functionality in dot NET takes a quarter of the time to do the same in ADF. Of course, it imbalance reduces as a person learns along, but that's pretty much the scenario for beginners. It's frustrating.
I have been working with ADF since last 3 months, and i can tell you that ADF is a really suitable for situations which is essential to provide fast development process for large enterprise applications with strong database integration.
Compairing to other JavaEE framworks like Spring,
It is extremely complex when fixing bugs becasue of the architechtur of the ADF and lack of dev community relative to Spring. Spring has large development community
around the framework.
It is hard to impliment MVC architecture with the ADF inter component integrations.
Spring Developers have much more reputation and demand compared to ADF developers.
ADF is very slow, heavy-weight, tightly-coupled compared to Spring and integrated framework with Oracle tools.
Hope this will help you to solve your problem and gain your knowledge. Happy coding!!!
What is the significance of new cloud platforms and databases like Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2?
Is it a replacement for enterprise application platforms like .net or Java EE in a cloud environment?
Is it neccessary to use these or other cloud specific platforms, or can we implement .net or Java EE on a cloud based environment?
I think the comparison is not correct to some extent. Cloud is a deployment issue and J2EE Technologies is a development issue.
The idea of clouds was to take away the hardware costs for existing application which have been build on J2EE or .NET or any other application development framework.
Yes when you deploy your applications in clud, there are some changes and some deployment strategies which would enforce some change in your application but application would still be J2EE or .NET as was the case before
I see two kinds of clouds, those that offer their own programming model and those that host applications developed in an existing programming model. Give the choice I would prefer the latter, I don't want to redevelop my existing apps and I want to sure that I'm free to host my app on my choice of host.
As it happens I'm a Java EE developer and there are Java EE clouds, so I'm OK. So for me Azure has little immediate significance other that to reinforce the message that serious vendors see a future for cloud computing.
Now, what is Azure? Is it a hoster of .NET apps, or is it offering a different programmng model? Or Both? I'm finding it hard to determine from the various web sites and reviews. There's talk of .NET programming an C# and VB and maybe other languages and using existing tooling, so my current guess is that .NET developers will be at home, but perhaps need to adapt their style.
My tentative opinion: if I'm a doing .NET I'll keep doing it and expect to find a suitable cloud one day. If Azure is that cloud (and I'd want to find out) well and good, if not then I'll wait for something better.
In a serious enterprise space I don't need to back a winner in a market place that's still evolving. I probably will have sensitive apps that I'm not going to put in a public cloud anyway, so sticking to Java EE suits me fine, I've got private cloud capabilities if I need them.
EC2 is kind of a hybrid; at its root it's a hosted virtual machine service that lets you choose the operating system you want (most Linux distributions, Solaris or a couple of versions of Windows Server) and then configure them as you like without restrictions.
On top of that, Amazon has built services such as Simple DB, Simple Queue Service and Simple Notification Service that make it into more of a development platform, but it's important to note that these run cross-platform and can be programmed to in multiple languages.
A link to Windows Azure's Tomcat Solution Accelerator can be found on MSDN's "Windows Azure Platform" landing page where you will also find links to the following:
Windows Azure SDK for Java
Windows Azure SDK for PHP
Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse
AppFabric SDK for Java™ Developers
AppFabric SDK for Ruby Developers
AppFabric SDK for PHP Developers
As well as...
MySQL PHP Solution Accelerator
MediaWiki MySQL Solution Accelerator