ADF productivity seminar
Last week i presented a productivity comparison between Oracle Forms Designer (a RAD tool) and Oracle Jdeveloper ADF at IT-eye’s ADF seminar. The first presentation during this seminar was given by oracle’s Ted Farrell. He gave an overview of ADF, grid computing and SOA. He also demoed ADF. It was very impressive, even current Forms Developer users were excited.
I’ve compared ADF with Forms Developer regarding productivity by creating a master detail form with both tools. The java application uses jclient (swing) & business components. I added some features like drop down boxes, list of value screens , check boxes, lookup fields, etc.
Using forms developer this takes about 30 minutes, and you’ll need to write 80 lines of code. Using JDeveloper it takes about 45 minutes, and you’ll have to write 105 lines of code. (The lines of code will change of course, depending on how you format it, but it gives you an indication of how much work each tool required).
Overall i’d say that for this example jdeveloper is 30% to 50% slower. These numbers will ofcourse be different for different screens, i do not want to suggest that these numbers are valid for all screens.
Although in this example Jdeveloper is less productive, there are very good reasons for using it. Using jdeveloper you create standards based java code, Forms Developer is a proprietary oracle solution. Also Forms Developer is very good for data entry back office applications, but it will get in your way if you try to create something else. Java on the other hand is much more flexible.
I’ve you are creating an appliction that consists of more than rich gui data entry screens, for example web services or html self service pages, Forms Developer is not your tool. The tool that oracle offers for these kinds of technologies is jdeveloper. You can probably share business logic between the different interface technologies. For example business components used by the html interface and the web services can be reused by a swing interface. This reuse could result in a rich gui productivity with jdeveloper which is higher than the productivity achieved using Forms Developer.
(More info: IT-eye ADF seminar)
February 1st, 2004 at 1:37 pm
I don’t see the point in comparing Oracle*Forms with Oracle JDeveloper as they are different means to different ends, in my book. People shouldn’t needlessly try to embark on the Java/J2EE train in order to be fashionable. Using Forms or JDeveloper should be considered on a case-by-case basis, as you’ve already pointed out yourself.
February 1st, 2004 at 9:10 pm
The point of this comparison is not to find the tool with the best productivity, but to give current users of Designer and Developer a indication of the productivity of jDeveloper.
February 1st, 2004 at 9:55 pm
Btw, most companies using Forms Developer and Designer are still convinced that one day Oracle will stop supporting these tools and that they’ll be ‘forced’ to move to a different development environment. So, obviously they are interested in how Java and Jdeveloper compare to their current toolset.
Personally i think they’ll want to move to java because of the benefits (html applications, web services, j2me, multi vender, standards based) before Oracle will stop supporting Forms Developer.
February 11th, 2004 at 11:12 pm
You don’t mention how much experience you have with both. Obviously, this has some impact on productivity.
Code you provide info on your experience with both?