It’s almost 2010 and JUnit runners are still an optional download for Oracle JDeveloper 11g. JDeveloper is a reasonable IDE and it’s improved over the years. It has most of the basic features an Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA user would expect including plenty of refactoring support.
Leaving out JUnit integration was unfortunate. My assumption is JDeveloper is used primarily in shops that are heavily Oracle based and usually with developers who are coming out of a PL/SQL background. Many of them may have done years of Oracle Forms and Reports. PL/SQL has utPLSQL, but it’s never caught on as default tool as you’d see in Java or Ruby.
The introduction to current practices like unit testing, refactoring, continuous integration, and static analysis are critical for shops that are just now moving into regular java development. As far as I can remember the JUnit support has been a standard part of Eclipse for 8 years or more and similarly for IntelliJ. Sometimes you run into organizations that are very comfortable with their software vendors warts and all. When you leave out basic unit testing integration as an optional plugin that you have to go out of your way to install you’re sending a clear message. Unit testing isn’t that important, you could probably just skip right past it. Even Visual Studio 2008 fully integrated unit testing and MS has been late to the party as it is.
A quick word of advice, for users of JDeveloper, the unit testing plugin isn’t really optional. Just consider the extra steps to download it part of the install process.
For legal reasons, the JUnit support is available on the JDeveloper “Check for Updates…” extension center. I believe it’s due to the fact that you need to acknowledge their EULA before using it, but if you choose {Help | Check for Updates…} and type in “junit” to narrow the list of extensions to those that match, you’ll find the “Junit” extension. Should only take a minute to download and install.
Thanks for the feedback. My concern is it’s not integrated with the JDeveloper to begin with, not that you can add it as an extension/plugin. I don’t think there’s an EULA issue as I’ve used IntelliJ, Eclipse, IBM’s RAD, and all of them were able to include integrated JUnit support. Just for fun IntelliJ includes TestNG out of the box as well.
Couldn’t this just be added to the default install? I’ve seen cases where not having it in the base project became just another reason not to take on unit testing. Never hurts to be at least feature compatible with all the other Java IDEs.