ADF

Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is a highly productive way to build consistent, reliable, cross-browser web applications (amongst other things), but, like many things in life, it can be a challenge to learn.

ADF is used all over the place in Oracle products – the human task forms in SOA Suite and BPM Suite, Enterprise Manager, customisation of WebCenter, building components (“taskflows”) to deploy in WebCenter – just to name a few.

It seems to us that a lot of the material out there assumes that you want to use ADF to build an application which is bound to data in a database.  While this may be the case for many people, we often want to have our data coming from web services, or Java classes, not a database.

So, through a series of blog posts, which will be listed on this page, we are going to try to help those folks out there who, like us, want to use ADF in a services based environment.

We will be doing this through examples.  The first example is building a modern web-based front end for Oracle E-Business Suite’s Sales Order Entry functionality.

There are two architectural patterns we will explore – the first places Oracle Service Bus between the application and the front end.  In this pattern, we use the service bus to provide service virtualisation, location transparency, srevice aggregation, caching, and so on.  The front end talks exclusively to the service bus.

In the second pattern, we will explore the use of ADF BC data services in much the same role as we used OSB in the first pattern.  This pattern is very simliar to the designused in Fusion Applications.

Example 1 – Building a web-based Sales Order Entry application with OSB and E-Business Suite

This example has four main parts:

• Introduction to the example,
• Preparing E-Business Suite,
• Building the services in Oracle Service Bus, and
• Building the front-end web application.

Please follow the links above to work through the example. (Coming soon)

Example 2 – Building a web-based Sales Order Entry application with ADF BC and E-Business Suite

Coming soon!

Some other ADF posts

• What you need to install and a handy reference to the components
• Creating your first simple ADF application (“Hello World!”)
  Creating a page, adding a component to it, running and testing an application
• Simple navigation
  Creating a few pages and navigating between them using buttons and actions
• Using the auto suggest behaviour
  Adding auto suggest to your input fields
• Using the HierarchyViewer component
  Displaying hierarchical information (like an organisational chart) graphically using the rich HierarchyViewer component
• Speeding up JDeveloper for large JSP pages