Every company, organization, and application developer needs an application framework that gives them the surety that they are developing their application that is in approval with the business rules. With the help of Oracle Application Framework, businesses can think globally to make the right decisions, they can manage systems globally that lowers costs and increases performance, and especially, they can work globally to be most productive. In this article, we will talk about the fundamentals of OAF and everything that you need to know.
Learn Oracle OAF to Unleash a Modern Career
Oracle OAF – Table of Contents
What is Oracle OAF?
For application development, Oracle Corporations developed a framework called Oracle Application Framework. It is a part of the Oracle E-business Suite. Firstly, this application is responsible for giving the development and deployment platform to the users to develop J2EE type applications, HTML based business applications, and web-based front end pages. This framework is also useful for customers who want to personalize or customize their application or develop any custom-application. Secondly, it allows them to personalize the user interface layout and the content that the UI displays according to the needs of their business. Oracle Application Extension has an Oracle JDeveloper tool in it. The developers use it for the creation of the application framework. It utilizes Java and XML language.
Why Oracle OAF?
Oracle Application Framework is a framework that acts as the skeletal support for your organization to build a number of enterprise-based applications. It is designed in such a way that it lessens the general issues that are faced during the development of the applications. These goals are achieved with the help of the code that is allowed to be shared across different application modules. It enables the users to concentrate on their business rather than on the low-level details of the framework. This system makes it a lot easier for the developer to develop the applications by helping them solve business problems and providing easy-access components, design patterns, rich UI, error handling, debugging tools, refined database accessibility, maintenance, best practices, easy compilation, and more. In conclusion, it is the most agile, reliable, and stable framework.
Why you should use Oracle OAF?
Apart from the features simplifying the work of businesses, there are several other reasons why the organizations should go with Oracle Application Framework and not any other framework available in the marketplace because not every framework is capable of fulfilling the needs of their customers.
- It is an open-source framework. This software comes with licensing that is not restrictive allowing the users to build applications.
- OAF has good documentation and support. However, paid supports are always much better, Oracle support gives the user satisfaction.
- It is the most efficient and helpful framework that developers can find as it saves them time for writing the same code, again and again, that is used in many different applications.
- This application is designed, developed, and tested a lot many times by many different developers thus it has a strong level of security. It addresses all the risks on time and allows the user to make necessary changes.
- It is easier to integrate with it. There are a lot of tools in this application related to web development. Thus, this makes it easier to link to the different tools and communicates with them.
Learn Oracle OAF to Unleash a Modern Career
Oracle OAF Features
Built on Fusion Middleware, the Oracle Application Framework has a lot to offer to its customers. The unique and demanding features are what make this framework the best choice for businesses and application developers. Additionally, it never misses a point and always offers the best services it can to its users. It provides the following features:
- Deployment Environment
- Integrated Development Environment
- Built-in Security
- Durable personalization and extensions
- Oracle portal interoperability
- Consistent and compelling User Interface
- Object-Oriented Reuse
- User Interface interactivity
Oracle OAF Architecture
The architecture of the Oracle Application Framework is based on the industry-standard MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern. This can be used to create extensions using all the functionalities present in the E-business Suite. There are mainly 3 components present in this architecture as it is component-based architecture. It has clean interfaces between the Controller, model, and view.
- First is the model component where business logic is implemented by the application. All the BC4J components such as Association Object, Entity Object, Application Module, View Link, and View Object come under this.
- The view component is where the application executes the user interface. Generally, view means the user interface that is visible to the end-user.
- The third and last component is the controller. This is where the application handles direct business flow and user interaction. In short, it is a simple java class file and it contains the methods for post back and initial page request. Process Request and Process Form Request are two common methods in it.
Oracle OAF Benefits
Oracle Application Framework or OAF offers declarative and visual approaches to the Java EE development. Apart from a rapid application development environment, consistent and compelling UI, and built-in personalization, it provides the following benefits to the users:
- Firstly, this framework helps to create self-service pages in Oracle E-business Suite.
- It works on basic Java EE principles and controls the flow of the application.
- It has an interactive and user-friendly UI.
- The software provides inbuilt security to the users to save them from unauthorized access.
- It supports several standards such as HTML, SQL, and JSP, etc.
- This framework eliminates the need to write a lot of repetitive code thus reducing the time to create an application.
- It is very efficient and it is a benefit which can never be underestimated. Moreover, the developers can build the code in much less time with the most efficiency.
Learn Oracle OAF to Unleash a Modern Career
Oracle OAF New Offerings
The latest update of Oracle Application Framework from the Oracle E-business Suite is the OAF 12.2.7. It is something that all Oracle E-business Suite users should apply this patch as the future OAF patches will require this as a prerequisite for EBS release 12.2.7. The new update has made a few fixes and they are:
- Personalizing a table with a row banding now works fine.
- An enhancement has been made allowing developers to set an accessibility role attribute in the element of table HTML.
- Selecting a menu item in the navigator to open in a new window now no more reopens the current page.
- Lastly, the aria-controls attribute did not point to a valid ID for the Show/hide component. This issue was fixed.
Some new features added in OAF’s latest release are:
- “Swan” User Interface
- Personalization
- Oracle JDeveloper 10g Release 3 (10.1.3)
- WSRP Support
- Service Interface
Advantages and Disadvantages of Oracle OAF
In this section, you will get to know about the advantages and disadvantages of using the application framework from Oracle that will help you make the right decision and benefit you in the long-term.
Advantages –
- To begin with, it provides the developer productivity and application customizability.
- The software has great end-user productivity.
- It has a highly extensible architecture.
- Enterprise-grade performance and scalability are up to standards.
- It supports open standards like Java, HTML, XML, Web services, JSP, and SQL.
- This application gives the browser look and feels of every page in the application.
- Also, the users can view the OA framework pages on phones too that contains the internet browsing feature.
- At last, it helps in controlling the flow of the application and helps create self-service pages too.
Disadvantages –
- Firstly, the user cannot see the design of the layout at development time.
- The pages of OAF are integrated and compatible only with the Oracle Applications.
- Drag and drop option is not available for the users.
- While designing a form layout, more R&D is required which is time-consuming.
- The development time is comparatively more.
- Lastly, only one application developer can create a complete component.