What is Oracle ADF?

Question

What is Oracle ADF?

On the Internet I found the following definition:

ADF integrates a mix of subframeworks to provide the key functions for object-relational mapping and other forms of service access, data bindings, and user interface, along with the functional glue to hold it all together. ADF stands for 'Applications Development Framework' and it's developed by Oracle. ADF is a framework and it'll help you build your applications easily as many of the redundant things that we do while we develop our applications are taken care by the framework.

But I still have a couple of questions with respect to understanding ADF:

1. ADF is an extension to the Java EE Framework, and can things that can be done using ADF (including SOA Development) be done by normal Java EE programming? (Please correct me if I am wrong.)

2. Is it mandatory to learn ADF for doing SOA applications?

Answer 1

It is a web development framework based on JSF. But heavier!!

If you plan doing web development with this, be warned that this framework is not very flexible. It feels like developing web software as in the 1999 with Visual Studio!!

You build everything in the Oracle IDE JDeveloper (incuding UI!) drag and dropping UI widget already made... If you can live with the default look and feel and do not want to include popular JavaScript libraries (jQUery) you should be fine. For example, building intranet applications could be OK. But if you want to do a public web application (Internet) I would not recommend this framework!

Answer 2

ADF is actually 4 "parts":

ADF Business Components is a declarative, meta-data based object relational mapping solution. It provides robust database read/write/update capabilities without the developer having to use Java (hence declarative) though the framework scan be extended with Java to add custom behavior.

ADF Model is a binding layer to bind the UI (ADF Faces based on JSF) without tight coupling UI components to the back end data model.

ADFController implements task flows, an advance on JSF page flows that allow you to break your application up into reusable sets of pages, called task flows, declarative transaction management.

ADF Faces is based on JSF and built on top of Trinidad, an open source JSF framework.

Yes, you can do almost everything ADF provides (not ADF C) in custom Java EE code. But it's a framework - it handles a lot of the repetitive, predictable, redundant code. Also, one can argue that once learned, you can be more productive in ADF than hand coding Java EE applications.