Okay, short version. Try to add a connection to a MySQL database in Oracle’s JDeveloper. I’m no expert in JDeveloper, nor JDBC to MySQL, so it took me a couple of (non-working) tries before I reverted to the Fine Material (as in: RTFM) and Google to discover that adding a JDBC driver/connection to MySQL is not a very intuitive task. It took me 20 minutes.
After playing around with the new (working) connection, I decided to try the same in Netbeans 5.0. I saved on the download and the extraction of the MySQL Connector/J archive, so let’s try to complete the task in 19 minutes. Well, actually it took me 30 seconds to add a working connection to MySQL and another 20 to my Oracle instance. Why? When you want to add a connection to a database, I want to do that in the databases-branch. I don’t want to Maintain Libraries, look for the correct syntax of an MySQL-jdbc connection, and finally repeat half of the process when defining the actual connection. Click to Add driver, Click to add connection, Click to logon. That’s how it should work. Netbeans passed with flying colors.