Andrej Koelewijn

Yesterday i attended a seminar on ADF organized by AMIS. Oracle’s Steven Davelaar presented some slides on ADF, and he discussed some of the result of his first projects with ADF.

To demo that ADF databindings aren’t Business Components specific Steven showed that you can use the ADF databindings in combination with castor, to easily access xml data, and with web services. Databinding are just declarations describing what services and data you have (data controls), and declaration describing where you use them. Once you’ve created the required java classes for your xml and you’ve create a service class with some business methods, you can create a jsp by dragging and dropping the data controls on your jsp.

Ofcourse Eclipse was also discussed and many agreed that for coding java (as opposed to using wizards and drag and drop) jDeveloper still lags Eclipse. But apparently the Jdeveloper development team is now focussing on improving the java code editor. (Suggestion: ctrl+shift+o, suggest fixes.)

Steven also mentioned that they would like to offer a real alternative to TOAD with the database support in JDeveloper.

Another interesting piece of news was that Oracle has licensed jess, which will be integrated into ADF to handle business rules.

UIX version 3.0 will be Java Server Faces compatible, which would normally mean that you could take UIX components and use them in any IDE which supports JSF. If these components use ADF databindings you probably won’t be able to use them in other IDE’s. We’ll see…

Some of the problems encountered with ADF:

• You can only have one struts config file per project,
• No support for out-of-the-box multi row editing,
• It’s hard to add an empty row to a dropdown list (UIX),
• No support for Struts Tiles,
• Some drag & drop bugs.

There will be a patch release for JDeveloper this week. This will be version 9.0.5.2, and it will have some IDE performance improvements.

Regarding JHeadstart, there will be a new version this year (end of summer?) which will be ADF compliant. This means that applications generated using JHeadstart for JDeveloper 9 can be regenerated for Jdeveloper 10G. However, you’ll have to redo all you customizations, so this will probably mean a lot of work. But the good news is that Jheadstart offers some migration help, as opposed to JDeveloper itself, which doesn’t help at all in migrating application from JDeveloper 9 to 10.

JHeadstart offers solutions to some of the current problems in ADF (e.g., multi row editing), so you may want to use it to be more productive with ADF.