Oracle Team Productivity Center

Hello all. Have you heard about the Oracle Team Productivity Center (OTPC)? If not, let me tell you that it is a tool that lets you connect several application lifecycle management tools such as Bugzilla, Subversion, Jira, etc. To your JDeveloper IDE. In that way, you only need JDeveloper to track bugs, commit your work, update task status, there is even a chat window that let you connect with the rest of your team! The idea here, is to improve developers productivity since they don't have to leave the development environment for such tasks.

It is very useful, at work we are using it in one of our projects and it works pretty well, specially the Subversion integration has been really nice since one change to an ADF EntityObject or ViewObject may result in several changes to other files. We haven't connect it to a continuous integration system (such as Hudson), but we're looking forward to do it in the near future.

The installation is pretty straight forward, you need to download the Team Productivity Center Sever installer and execute it on your server. What you need:

• JDeveloper 11gR2 (11.1.2.3)
• Of course, JDK should be installed on the server. I have tested with JDK 7 and it works.
• Download the installer from OTN.
• Installation documentation from Oracle or installation instructions from others.
• Database: Oracle, MySQL, etc. OTPC will create several tables for its internal use.
• Application Server: Weblogic, Glassfish, etc. This is important since OTPC will be deployed to this application server.
• You can access a free tutorial in the Oracle Learning Library. Search for Team Productivity Center. 

There's plenty documentation about how to install and start with this tool, so I'm not explaining that in this post. Instead, I'm going to tell you some configurations that were not so obvious:

• During installation, you define an Administration Account, you should write it down since that's the information you need for accessing the OTPC server from JDeveloper and for creating new users.

• If using Glassfish server, make sure that in the step Application Server Location you select a path like this one: <GLASSFISH_INSTALL_DIR>/glassfish/domains/<YOUR_DOMAIN>/autodeploy

• After installation, you can check whether OTPC is running if you see the following page when trying to reach: <YOUR SERVER_AND_PORT>/otpc, where <YOUR_SERVER_AND_PORT> should be something like: localhost:8080

• Once you install the server, you should install the extension on JDeveloper. For that, go to Help>Check for updates. Doing this enables a new menu: View>Team with many options for team development.

• OTPC comes with a Chat tool which can be configured to connect to a chat server. You can connect to any chat server that supports XMPP/Jabber talk client such as Google Talk. Following are the configurations you need in order to connect to Google Talk from JDeveloper, the same configurations work if you have Google Apps account and want to connect to the Google Talk of your company:

see ya!


References:

JDeveloper 11gR2. Oracle [online].
Available on Internet: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/overview/index.html
[accessed on January 14 2012].

Oracle Tam Productivity Center. Oracle [online].
Available on Internet: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/tpc/overview/index.html
[accessed on January 13 2012].

Oracle Team Productivity Center (OTPC) – Team Server part. ANDREAS KOOP [online].
Available on Internet: http://multikoop.blogspot.com/2009/12/oracle-team-productivity-center-otpc.html
[accessed on January 14 2012].

Installation Guide for Oracle Team Productivity Center Server. Oracle [online].
Available on Internet: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E35521_01/install.111230/e17075/tpcig.htm
[accessed on January 14 2012].

Susan Duncan Blog. [online].
Available on Internet: http://susanduncan.blogspot.com/
[accessed on January 06 2012].