JCAPS 6 Impressions

I've started to use JCAPS 6 a little of over the past month and thought I'd share some of my initial impressions.
  • Finally a JCAPS editor I can use! I found the previous version of the JCAPS IDE hard to develop with. It was based on Netbeans 3 and didn't have a lot of the features I had grown accustomed to using (refactoring tools and a local history to name two). It was just plain old, clunky, and slow.

The new version is based on the latest Netbeans and all the goodness is back. And it's fast.
  • No more repository. Well, almost. JCAPS 6 has a few different modes to work in - repository based or non-repository. A repository based project allows JCAPS developers to work in essentially the same way they did with JCAPS 5 - JCDs, OTDs, connectivity maps, deployment profiles and yes - the repository. It's also the way to migrate legacy JCAPS project to the new platform - through a simple export and import between the repositories.

I haven't used the repository portion of JCAPS 6 much, but some coworkers have and report it works as expected (with an improved interface).

I wasn't familiar with either the JCA or JBI before JCAPS 6 so here is my 10-cent definition of each (NOTE: the Wikipedia links above provide more thorough - and probably more correct - definitions):
  • JCA is an abstraction layer for connecting to third party services like databases and legacy systems. I think of it like generic JDBC that can do more.
  • JBI provides a standard way for various portions of your SOA to talk to one another (it's the ESB). I see this as an abstraction so you don't really need to know if your composite application is talking to a web service, JMS, an EJB, or possibly JCA components. OpenESB is the JBI implementation used by JCAPS.

The value add for JCAPS is to provide more (and better) JCA and JBI components than are available using the "free" Netbeans. Thus helping to make developers on it's platform more effective.

So, while my dive into JCAPS 6 hasn't been especially deep to this point, so far I like what I'm seeing...

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