Project Dogfood, why I am going to spend 20% of my time writing ADF apps

Most of the people working on JDeveloper spend a lot of time writing in Java to support developers who build ADF applications. Unfortunately this doesn't give us developer a lot of daily experience building the sort of application that our customer build day to day using our tools. Particular those of use like myself who work on more general JEE technologies such as web services.

To try and fix this, and hopefully improve the development experience for all of our users, our gov'ner Ted has decreed in the next cycle that every part of of the JDeveloper development team will take time out to build real ADF apps.

To do this 20% of our working week has been set aside in the next development cycle. (The one after next from the customer's point of view) We all have to work in teams to build new and hopefully interesting applications. The parameters of the applications are not defined yet; but we should see some interesting projects coming out of the wood.

This is good news for me of course as it allow me broaden my skills, CometD here I come, and to take some time to escape from web services on day a week. It will be interesting to see how this works with the pressures of releasing production software; but I hope we do get the time as this will be a very interesting experiment. I will let you know how it goes.