Developer is going away (it is deprecated in version 8.2) so just to let people know that for most things the Designer will work (backward compatible) with v7.1.x, 8.0, 8.2.
Advantage is that it is eclipse based and editing java services is FINALLY great.
It’ll take you a while to figure out where everything goes, but once you’re using it for a few days you’ll find it hard to go back…
So don’t muck around with Developer (I noticed a lot of people still using it): switch over to Designer and get a proper IDE and get used to the future way of doing stuff on webMethods.
Switched back to Developer as the advantages didn’t much matter. The one thing I missed was that when running a service it would not save the values in the run/test dialog between runs. The Save/Load buttons are still there but I like that Developer keeps the values from the last run.
I can appreciate the enthusiasm for Java service editing, but personally I wouldn’t characterize it as great. It’s definitely a step up from Developer’s plain text editor but still far from what Java developers will be looking for.
Try again with 8.2… It not only remembers the service inputs between invokes… It remembers between restarts of the IDE. Developer can’t do that.
But seriously, take a look at the 8.2 Designer…
Thinks like the comment fields have a mouseover to display it, and you can move the screen around to suit. It’s not perfect, but it’s the future: so better to get used to it and learn to be effective on it rather than cling to a product that is to be decommissioned. In 8.2 you can’t edit certain things in Developer any more.
There are some other things like service templates which might be useful (I’ve set up a “top level service” one that sets stateless to true and some other things).
You can debug/run multiple services at once which might be useful for certain types of testing (e.g. a proper debugger).
As for “proper IDE” = you can add in plugins for the other SDLC tools you require… e.g. the build I’ve created for our developer community includes the atlassian plugin (so jira/bamboo integration). And the java code syntax/code completion etc.
