I have been following BEA’s acquisition of M7 to see what happens to the NitroX product. We are a big WebLogic shop and so I was curious to see what BEA is going to bake in the new release of NitroX renamed Workshop Studio. The new Workshop Suite is based on the Callisto (Eclipse 3.2 and WTP 1.5) release and is chalk-full of goodies including EJB 3.0 (JPA), Kodo, Spring, JSF (yuck), Struts, JSTL, Hibernate support among other specs/frameworks. Another cool thing in Workshop Studio is the ORM tool that is built-in that allows developers to access databases and build an object relational entity layer to model the data using persistence engine providers that implement the EJB3, JPA, Kodo and Hibernate. Workshop also supports Tomcat, Resin, Jetty, JBoss, and WebSphere in addition to WebLogic.
I am a die-hard IntelliJ IDEA fan and IDEA is still the BEST IDE in the market. IDEA has the best refactoring, smart-type auto completion, code analyzer capabilities and it is really the best IDE for writing code. However, it is missing many of the bells-n-whistles that Eclipse and now NetBeans have. In the last few months, I found myself looking at the NetBeans 5.5 betas and Eclipse 3.2 betas and wondering why IDEA was missing a lot of that functionality. Sun has really turned around NetBeans and the latest 5.5 betas have really rocked. The combination of the Profiler with NetBeans makes it a compelling offering and the price is right.
Guess I am getting off-topic here – So I’ve been playing with the latest release of Workshop Studio and my first impressions are very positive. I am hoping to use it exclusively for a month and then blog about my experiences. I recently upgraded my Linux box to Ubuntu (Dapper Drake) and I’ve been running more than SVN, MySQL, Apache, Tomcat and WebLogic on it. I try to install all of my development tools on my XP and Linux box for consistency and so I was able to install Workshop Studio on my Ubuntu Linux box without any problems. Out of the box, Workshop Studio doesn’t support Ubuntu but the installer does allow you to continue installation and use Workshop Studio. Here are the steps I used to install Workshop Studio:
I’m assuming you already have the 1.5 JDK installed on your box. If you don’t, you can use apt-get to get and install the latest SDK. This article at the Javalobby has a lot more details but here’s all I did for my installation:
sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
sudo update-alternatives—config java
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.5.0-sun-1.5.0.06/
sudo ./WorkshopInstaller.bin
The installer clears the launcher icons in the directory of your choice and you should be all set to use Workshop Studio. On his blog, Bill Roth discusses his experiences of installing Workshop on his Ubuntu box using JRockit. In addition to being a fellow Marquette alum and an all around great guy, Bill is also the vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit at BEA Systems. Bill asks the question in his blog entry about BEA officially support Ubuntu in their products and I would have to say a resounding yes to that. Most enterprises use RedHat on their servers but Ubuntu is fast catching up on the desktop side and so BEA should support RedHat and Ubuntu. Cannot wait for the day when I get type in apt-get jrockit, workshop and weblogic.
Vinny Carpenter's blog 