Fun with Oracle’s ADF January 5
We’ve been doing a lot of work here lately with Oracle’s ADF framework. It is a framework based on JSF, though to anyone who asks, I usually tell them that Oracle’s ADF Faces is to JSF just as Oracle Forms is to C. It may be based on JSF, but knowing JSF isn’t going to help you too much.
Before I go on, I should specify. Oracle’s ADF Framework actually consists of a front-end called ADF Faces and a back-end, ADF Business Components. Despite that it is theoretically possible to create ADF based applications in any IDE, if you are using ADF Faces and ADF Business Components, it really doesn’t make sense to not use JDeveloper. The current production release of JDeveloper (and ADF) is 10.1.3, but 10.1.3 doesn’t quite provide everything that we need for the project we are working on, and so we are working with JDeveloper 11g (TP3).
ADF Faces in itself is actually just a set of JSF tags, previous versions of which have been donated to the Apache MyFaces project. The new set of tags which are referred to by the name, ADF Rich Faces provide some great functionality with all sorts of AJAX tricks built-in.
The ADF BC Layer itself is no slouch either. It is another persistence layer and it attempts to tackle some of the more interesting problems that come up when you are in the business of translating client-server applications to web-based applications. It consists of an Entity layer for objects that need to update the database and a View layer which consists of Views based on Entities or Read-Only views based on SQL queries.
Since the Entity Layer is cached on the server-side, it performs nicely and it allows you implement some long-running transactions that would otherwise be more difficult to implement in a multi-tiered environment.
Of course, all of these benefits don’t come without a cost, but we can talk more about that later. For now, if you are interested in taking a look at what’s out there that can help you with that next enterprise application you are building, take a look at the latest release of Oracle’s ADF. Be sure to check out some of the ADF blogs for some good tips and tutorials.
johnprugby Jan 7
My exposure to ADF has been to focus on the security aspects of 11g. It is an incredibly promising approach to security that goes far beyond placing controls on access to pages typical of web-based applications. Combining a robust role-based registry with the ability to control access to items available on various pages allows developers to focus on business logic and not the presentation layer.
It would take more time than the average reader would spend reading a blog entry to get a good handle on the capabilities of ADF in the security realm, so let me power-off by saying that ADF’s approach to security going forward is one of the more exciting developments in the sphere of internet application development. ADF is preparing for a world where applications are much more than a series of pages.