Oracle ADF Tutorial

Welcome to Oracle ADF Tutorial. The target of this tutorial is to give inside and out comprehension of Oracle ADF.

Known for its innovations and aggressive marketing. Oracle has created a lot of software services such as database software, database management system, Human Capital Management systems, and much more and it is continuing to grow rapidly. One such product created by the Oracle Corporation is the Oracle ADF, also called as Oracle Application Development Framework. It is a java based framework which helps the developers to create applications easily. This article will tell you everything that you need to know about Oracle ADF.

What is Oracle ADF?

Oracle Application Development Framework is an end-to-end application framework that simplifies and accelerates implementing enterprise applications as it builds on Java EE standards and open-source technologies. It is the perfect solution for developers who want to create applications using the web, mobile, and desktop interfaces that search, create, display, modifies and validate data.
It is easy to use as users can use Oracle ADF completely to create an application or they can use different parts of it with combinations of other technologies accordingly. It is highly customizable and developers can develop the applications faster with it. It provides out-of-the-box infrastructure services to its users and offers a visual and declarative application development experience.

Why Oracle ADF?

Oracle Application development framework can prove to be the best choice for one’s project because of the presence of a visual UI editing option and numerous pre-made components in it. New members to the team can help contribute to the project a lot by using this framework even if they have less coding experience and familiarity which frees up the team’s most experienced programmers to focus on the advanced functionality of the project. It is great for data visualization too. The drag and drop feature allows the components to be tied into data sources with the minimum setup required. This framework is well-documented and has a highly active community which makes it the best choice for developers.

Why you should use Oracle ADF?

Oracle ADF provides the perfect framework for the development of commercial enterprise applications. Here are a few reasons why one should use it.

1. It gives you a lot. Deployed on Tomcat, JBoss, GlassFish, and other same applications, it can be your savior in developing applications.
2. It is designed for creating heavy-duty enterprise applications and fulfills all your requirements.
3. It is an open-source framework which means you can use JDeveloper, Eclipse, or any other software to create your applications easily.
4. It is great for productivity as it comes with pre-written code, design patterns, and unique functionalities through which you can develop applications easily and rapidly.
5. It has a huge library of JSF components, takes care of multi-browser support and generic aspects of java and java EE code.
6. You can rely on oracle as it is very stable and of very high quality.

Oracle ADF Features

Based on the standard, robust, and secure Java EE platform forming the basis of most of the enterprise applications, this Oracle ADF provides a decent number of features to its users that adheres to standard patterns and practices and reduces the developer’s efforts in a great way.

• Productivity with a choice – Developers have the freedom to choose from different technologies to implement them to different layers and get productive development experience. Apart from that, they can even choose their development style.
• Declarative Personalization – It is the most unique aspect of Oracle ADF. It allows the developers to customize XML definitions. Users can personalize the interface of their application and implement modifications in page layouts, business rules, and page flows.
• Integrated Security – It has a built-in security implementation across all its layers. Users can be assigned roles and authorizations. It eliminates the need to replicate security mechanisms.
• Visual Java EE Development – This development tool simplifies application creation. Visual and declarative tools are offered at each layer of this framework.
• Business Services Development – Out-of-the-box business services provided such as resource pooling, translation, declarative validation rules, locking, etc.
• User Interfaces Development –
  ->ADF Faces has a set of 150 UI components.
  ->Visual page flow modeling provided using drag and drop features.
  ->The visual editor offered for the development of any kind of component.
  ->Reusability features provided for maximizing reusability.

Oracle ADF Architecture

Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is built on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. An application based on this design pattern is divided into:

1. Model-layer
2. View layer
3. Controller

The model layer runs the business logic and handles all the interactions with the data-sources, the view layer handles the application user interface and the controller manages the application flow. It acts as an interface between the model layer and the view layer.
Dividing the application into these layers simplifies the maintenance and reuse of several components across applications. The Oracle ADF is based on these 4 layers:

1. Business-service layer – It manages the interaction with the data persistence layer and provides services such as relational mapping, business logic execution, data persistence, and transaction management.
2. The controller layer – It handles the user input and manages the flow of an application. With its help, users can break the flow of application into smaller, reusable task flows and create page fragment flows that run inside a region of a single containing page. User interface fragments are reused the maximum number of times and integration portals and mash-up applications are simplified with it.
3. The view layer – The user interface of the application is represented by the view layer. It allows the user to reuse their business services and access them from a web client. Oracle ADF offers a set of 150 Ajax-enabled JSF components that simplify the creation of dynamic and appealing UIs.
4. The model layer – It connects the business services to the objects that use them in the other layers. It provides a single interface that can be used by customers to access any kind of business services. This layer consists of two components – data controls and data bindings. They utilize the metadata to define the interfaces. Data controls abstract details of business service implementations from clients and data bindings expose the data control methods and attributes to user interface components.

Oracle ADF Benefits

There are many benefits of using Oracle Application Development Framework that makes it unique among other such Java EE based frameworks. The benefits are as follows:

• End-to-end solution – It focuses on every layer and provides a complete and integrated solution for each of them. It further provides support for the development lifecycle phase of each project.
• Development Environment – It provides visual aids and a declarative approach which minimizes the need to write framework code making it a perfect tool for building applications.
• Platform Independence – Developers are locked into specific software vendors in other frameworks. However, it is not the case with this. ADF runtime can be installed on various Java EE application servers.
• Technology Choice – It supports multiple technologies for every layer thus allowing the developers to implement the layers in the way they want.
• Technology Commitment – It is technologically committed. It allows us to develop the portal, wireless and web applications with committed support and consistent technology stack.
• Metadata-driven – It is metadata-driven thus making the application components flexible and reusable.
• Declarative Customization – Unique solution provided allowing the organization to use a single base application and customize it according to the needs.
• Enhanced Reusability – This ADF provides support for reusability features such as task flows, business services, templates, and much more.
• Source Availability – It provides source code to customers with a support license. It helps developers understand mechanisms in the framework and debug problems easily.
• Support and Training – Provides support round the clock to its customers and offers regular instructor lead courses to learn its functionality.

Oracle ADF New Offerings

Oracle ADF has successfully proven itself to be a reliable and ideal platform for building and deploying enterprise applications. It included a lot of new offerings in its latest version for giving the customers a good experience and satisfaction while using this. It added Oracle ADF Faces, UI components, business components, Oracle JET Integration, the cloud, JDeveloper release, and much more. It has added capabilities such as support for complex type parameters, parameters to batch operations, query master, controlling default set of fields, etc. which made it better than before. It succeeded in providing everything that the developer needs without compromising anything.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Oracle ADF

Despite being called as a perfect solution for application developers, Oracle Application Development Framework comes with its advantages and disadvantages. This platform-independent and metadata-driven framework has the following pros and cons:

Advantages –

• It increases productivity and it is easy to use.
• It promotes service-oriented development and architecture (SOA).
• It is a standards-based framework that uses Java EE, SOA, SCA, SDO, etc.
• Even developers with less experience can use this without having any troubles.
• It provides maintainable, robust, and great performance applications.
• Users get 150+ Ajax-based user interface components with a drag and drop feature.
• It has maintainability of code and easily integrates with other components developed by Oracle.
• It utilizes JavaServer Faces which allows the use of templates and modular user interfaces thus allowing rapid full-stack development of applications and testing the application with the option of further customizing it.

Disadvantages –

• The user has to do a lot of hits and trials to understand the behavior of layout components perfectly.
• If someone doesn’t have prior experience with the Oracle applications, then they will have to spend a good time learning the functionality of ADF.
• The query component which is present in ADF faces that are used to build criteria doesn’t give an option to change the layout of the fields.
• JDeveloper and LOV that are generated have a few bugs. The application crashes when the user does refactor or deletes some resources.
• It lacks in-depth documentation and skills and the learning curve is very steep as it takes around 3-6 months in becoming productive through this framework assuming that the developer is skilled.