Oracle Database Discussions

I'm sorry to tell you that with Designer, what you see is what you get. You can tell Designer about your preferred editors for text and for HTML, and you could probably tell it to use Netbeans as your editor, but that wouldn't give you much benefit. I mostly don't use an external editor with Designer - the built-in editors are good enough for what little editing I do with Designer. Designer also does not generate to a Java or JEE environment, unless you want to write the generator yourself.

As for JDeveloper, Designer really doesn't talk to JDeveloper either. However, there used to be a JDeveloper extension that could read the Designer repository and use it to generate ADF Business Components for modules that you designed with Designer - they might be Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Visual Basic, or Web PL/SQL modules. I know that it worked with JDeveloper 10.1.2, but I don't know if the extension has been updated to work with JDeveloper 10.1.3. I don't know if there are plans to update it for JDeveloper 11 either. I hope so - I still have a lot of stuff in my repository.

If you are willing to switch to JDeveloper, you might want to look at JHeadstart, which I understand can get more out of the Designer repository than the JDeveloper extension can. Someone want to confirm that?

At this point, you may be asking yourself, "Gee, then why would I want to use Oracle Designer?" You might want to consider using Designer only for database design at a logical (E/R Diagrams) and physical level (Server Model Diagrams), and switch to your preferred IDE after you generate and execute your DDL. If you only model databases on a physical level, you might look at the diagramming tools in JDeveloper - they are quite good. Oracle is also adding modelling and diagramming tools to SQL Developer, so you might want to keep that at the back of your mind for future reference.