PeopleTools 8.60 New Features for Developers

PeopleTools 8.60 has a few long awaited productivity features for developers.  I say long awaited because most code editors have had these features for a long time and Application Designer is playing a little catch-up.  Still.... I'm not complaining. Application Designer does the job and these few handy Developer productivity features are most welcome for those of us that spend a lot of time editing PeopleCode and SQL.

I've just selected these 5 initially and as I explore 8.60 more over the coming weeks I hope to share more on what I like and what I find.  So... in no particular order.

(1) F8 & ALT-F8 to Zoom in and out the Application Engine window.

(2) CTRL-D on a PeopleCode line will duplicate the line.  This also works in the SQL Editor.  

(3) CTRL-U will toggle a comment tags for one or more selected PeopleCode lines.  Nice!  I know I'm going to be using this one a lot.

(4) Select a string and any other matching strings will be highlighted in green.  This can be any string including comments, SQL, commands, methods, etc.  This is a nice feature and is limited to the  PeopleCode and SQL editors so this doesn't work in HTML or StyleSheet  editors.

(5) Brackets are now colour coded to show the respective open and close pairs. A red coloured bracket indicates that there is no corresponding open or close tag.  A green bracket shows that there is matching bracket. The brackets might not be in the right place of course but we can't expect a runtime parser to deal with our mistakes.  Colour blind developers may have some fun with this one!

You can read about these and so many more new features in the Oracle PeopleTools 8.60 New Feature Overview document (MOS Doc ID 2897533.1 (login required)).

And you can watch them in action below in this short video.