Oracle White Paper—Oracle Application Development Framework Overview

An Oracle White Paper

July 2009

Oracle Application Development

Framework Overview
 Oracle White Paper—Oracle Application Development Framework Overview

Introduction ......................................................................................... 1
Oracle ADF – Making Java EE Development Simpler .................... 2
THE ORACLE ADF ARCHITECTURE ................................................ 3
The Business Services Layer .......................................................... 4
The Controller Layer ....................................................................... 4
The View Layer ............................................................................... 5
The Model Layer ............................................................................. 5
Productivity with Choice .................................................................. 6
ORACLE ADF BENEFITS ................................................................... 6
Visual and Declarative Java EE Development ................................ 6
Benefits Over Other Frameworks .................................................... 8
CONCLUSION .................................................................................. 10
 Oracle White Paper—Oracle Application Development Framework Overview

Introduction
Java EE is a standard, robust, scalable, and secure platform that forms the basis for
many of today’s enterprise applications. Java EE provides a set of specifications for
building multi-tier applications using the JavaTM language. In the past, there was a direct
correlation between the robust nature of an application to the complexity required to
achieve it. However, with the advent of the Oracle ADF framework, you are able to
provide the implementation of extremely rich Java EE applications, adhering to standard
patterns and practices with greatly reduced effort.

Additionally, the increased need for organizations to build composite applications that
utilize Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles has forced developers to create
applications that are extremely agile. Implementing these best practices in agile
applications usually involves writing a significant amount of infrastructure code, adding
another obstacle for developers building their first Java EE application.

In addition to providing robust, performant, and maintainable applications; Oracle

Application Development Framework also provides the best of breed infrastructure code
to implement agile SOA based applications thereby removing the effort involved in an
organization “rolling their own” and allowing a team to jump right in to adding value
versus building an infrastructure.

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 Oracle White Paper—Oracle Application Development Framework Overview

Oracle ADF – Making Java EE Development Simpler

Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) is an innovative, yet mature Java EE
development framework available from Oracle and unlike most other frameworks is directly
supported and enabled by the award winning development environment, Oracle JDeveloper 11g.
Oracle ADF simplifies Java EE development by minimizing the need to write code that
implements the application’s infrastructure allowing the users to focus on the features of the
actual application. Oracle ADF provides these infrastructure implementations as part of the
framework. To recognize a set of runtime services is not enough, Oracle ADF is also focused on
the development experience to provide a visual and declarative approach to Java EE
development through the Oracle JDeveloper 11g development tool.
For example, Oracle ADF makes it easy to develop agile applications that expose data as services
by coupling a service interface to the built-in business services in ADF. This separation of
business service implementation details is performed in Oracle ADF via metadata. Use of this
metadata-driven architecture enables application developers to focus on the business logic and
user experience, rather than the details of how services are accessed.
Creating the user experience is as simple as drag-and-dropping the desired data controls onto the
page design and indicating what type of component should represent that data. In the example
illustrated, we are able to take a database table exposed as a business service, and request
JDeveloper to render the data as a table simply by dragging-and-dropping the control on the
page and responding to the automatic popup by indicating a table as the desired rendering
component. Oracle ADF takes care of the rest.

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By using Oracle ADF, the implementation details of these services are stored in metadata in the
ADF Model layer. This enables developers to exchange services without modifying the user
interface, making the application extremely agile. Additionally, the developer creating the user
interface does not need to bother with business service access details. Instead they can focus on
developing the application interface and interaction logic.

THE ORACLE ADF ARCHITECTURE

Oracle ADF is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. An MVC application
is separated into: 1) a model layer that handles interaction with data-sources and runs the
business logic, 2) a view layer that handles the application user interface, and 3) a controller that
manages the application flow and acts as the interface between the Model and the View layers.
Separating applications into these three layers simplifies maintenance and reuse of components
across applications. The independence of each layer from the others results in a loosely coupled,
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).
Oracle ADF implements MVC and further separates the model layer from the business services
to enable service-oriented development of applications. The Oracle ADF architecture is based on
four layers:
• The Business Services layer - provides access to data from various sources and handles
business logic.
• The Model layer - provides an abstraction layer on top of the Business Services layer, enabling
the View and Controller layers to work with different implementations of Business Services in
a consistent way.
• The Controller layer - provides a mechanism to control the flow of the Web application.
• The View layer - provides the user interface of the application.

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Oracle ADF Architecture

Oracle ADF lets developers choose the technology they prefer to use when implementing each
of the layers. The diagram above shows the various options available for developers when
building Oracle ADF applications. The glue that integrates the various components of Java EE
applications and makes development so flexible is the Oracle ADF model layer. EJB, Web
Services, JavaBeans, and JPA/EclipseLink/TopLink objects and many others can all be used as
Business Services for the Oracle ADF Model. View layers can include Swing applications and
MS Office integration as well as HTML interfaces using JSP, Java Server Faces (JSF) and ADF
Faces.

The Business Services Layer

The Business Services layer manages interaction with a data persistence layer. It provides such
services as data persistence, object/relational mapping, transaction management, and business
logic execution.
The Business Services layer in Oracle ADF can be implemented in any of the following options:
As simple Java classes, EJB 2.1/3.0, Web services, JPA objects, and Oracle ADF Business
Components.

The Controller Layer

The controller layer manages the applications flow and handles user input. For example, when
you click a Search button on a page, the controller determines what action to perform (do a
search) and where to navigate to (the results page).

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There are three controller options for web-based applications in JDeveloper: Oracle ADF
Controller, which provides the most functionality; the unaugmented JSF controller or the
Apache Struts. Whichever controller you use, you will typically design your application flow by
laying out pages and navigation rules on a diagram. Using ADF controller you can break your
application's flow into smaller, reusable task flows; include non-visual components such as
method calls in your flow; and create "page fragment" flows that run inside a region of a single
containing page. This approach encourages maximum reusability for user interface fragments and
simplified integration into portals and mashup applications.

The View Layer

The View layer represents the user interface of the application. The view layer can be based on
HTML, JSP, JavaServer Faces (JSF), rich Java components, or XML and its variations to render
the user interface. The View layer can be a Web client, a client-server swing desktop based
application, Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, or a wireless implementation for a mobile device such
as a phone.

The Model Layer

The model layer connects the business services to the objects that use them in the other layers.
Oracle ADF provides a model layer implementation that sits on top of business services,
providing a single interface that can be used to access any type of business service. The model
layer consists of two components, data controls and data bindings, which utilize metadata files to
define the interface. Data controls abstract the business service implementation details from
clients. Data bindings expose data control methods and attributes to UI components, providing a
clean separation of the view and model. Due to the metadata architecture of the model layer,
developers get the same development experience when binding any type of Business Service layer
implementation to the View and Controller layers. The Model layer in Oracle ADF also serves as
the basis for JSR-227 “A Standard Data Binding & Data Access Facility for J2EE”. The goal of
this JSR is to standardize data binding for Java EE applications.

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Productivity with Choice

Developers can choose different technologies to implement each of Oracle ADF‘s layers, and
still get the same productive development experience. For example, the same gestures and
methods would be used to create an ADF Swing application based on ADF Business
Components as would be used to create a ADF Faces application based on Enterprise
JavaBeans. In addition to the choice of technologies implemented, developers can choose their
development style (declarative, visual, or by coding), their development environment (JDeveloper
or another IDE, such as Eclipse), and their deployment environment (any Java EE-compliant
server).

ORACLE ADF BENEFITS

Visual and Declarative Java EE Development

A critical aspect of making a development framework useful is having a development tool that
simplifies the creation of applications using this framework.
Oracle offers visual and declarative tools for each layer of Oracle ADF. These tools, which are
integrated into the JDeveloper IDE, benefit Java developers even if they don’t use the runtime
features of Oracle ADF.

Business Services Development

Oracle JDeveloper includes a variety of ways to construct business services including: EJB/JPA,
web services, simple Java objects, and ADF BC, among others. “Productivity with Choice” is a
cornerstone to this approach. When generating these, it is possible to make use of a wizard-
driven approach to generate Business Services that provide Java interfaces to these tables. With
simply a right-click these interfaces can then be exposed as web services, including SDO based

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web services. Additionally, keeping with the theme of being visual and declarative, it is also
possible to accomplish the same thing via visual modeling to generate these interfaces.
Oracle ADF Business Components is a framework focused on creating objects, which
implement the Business Services layer on top of a data source, in a more declarative way. It
provides out-of-the-box services such as transaction management, resource pooling, locking,
declarative validation rules, translation, and object-relational mapping. Oracle ADF BC should
feel familiar to developers with a background in 4gl declarative database driven development,
offering such features as defining java objects based on SQL, declarative definition of validation
rules, and pre-defined events where code can be injected into the business service life cycle. ADF
BC development is done through declarative dialogs and property inspectors. With built-in
implementation of common JAVA EE design patterns in the framework, the performance and
scalability of the application is assured.

User Interface Development

Visual and declarative development features of the View and Controller layers of an application
are plentiful in Oracle JDeveloper:
• A page flow modeler for the ADF controller, the basic JSF framework page flow controller
and the open-source Apache Struts framework, providing visual page flow modeling using
simple drag and drop of components onto a diagram.
• A visual editor for JSP, JSF, HTML, Swing, and Wireless based user interfaces, allowing
WYSIWYG development for all types of components.
• Declarative development tools for adding components to the user interface, including the
creation of declarative components, a property inspector, extensible component palette, and
data control palette.
• Reusability features – several features for maximizing reusability, including the creation of task
flows, ADF Libraries, and declarative components.
• ADF Faces - a large set of UI components built on top of the standard JSF APIs that leverage
the latest technologies — including partial page rendering and Ajax — to provide a rich,
interactive user interface.

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Visual JSP and JSF editing

The visual and declarative development tools are synchronized in the JDeveloper IDE so that
the visual editor, property inspector, and modelers are synchronized with the source code at all
times. Thus, developers can choose their development style – drag and drop, declaratively define
properties, or edit source code directly.

Binding Business Services Components to the User Interface

Oracle JDeveloper provides a very easy way to bind components from the Business Services
layer to your Controller and View layers using an innovative implementation of the JSR-227 data
control. The Data Control Palette provides a view into the Business Services layer. Developers
can simply drag-and-drop data objects and bind them to their user interface implementation. The
same mechanism enables an easy binding of controller actions to methods defined in the
Business Services layer. All using purely visual and declarative gestures.

Benefits Over Other Frameworks

The key characteristics of Oracle ADF that makes it unique among other Java EE frameworks
are:
End-to-End Solution – Oracle ADF doesn’t focus on just one layer of the Java EE
architecture. ADF provides an integrated and complete solution for every Java EE layer from the
view layer and data-bindings (JSR-227), through the business services and data access; as well as
support for every development life-cycle phase from inception through support.

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Development Environment – Many of the other Java EE frameworks lack support by

development tools. Oracle JDeveloper provides visual aids and a declarative approach to
minimize the need to write code, making it a perfect tool for building Oracle ADF-based
applications. This declarative development approach also reduces the learning curve for
developers familiar with 4GL-style tools. Developers who wish to use another IDE, such as
Eclipse, are able to do so due to the standardization of ADF.
Platform Independence – Other frameworks lock developers into a specific software vendor.
The Oracle ADF runtime, however, can be installed on any Java EE compliant application server
and business services can connect to any SQL-92 compliant database.
Technology Choice – Developers have preferences for the way they implement different layers
of an application. Oracle ADF supports multiple technologies for each of the layers of the
application and doesn’t enforce a specific technology or a specific development style on the
developer.
Technology Commitment - It is important to note that Oracle ADF is the technology choice
for the Oracle next generation set of enterprise applications and is in continuous use for internal
development purposes. The product is used to develop Portal applications, wireless applications,
and web applications, and therefore provides a committed, supported, and consistent technology
stack.
Metadata-Driven – All layers of the Oracle ADF framework offer declarative options for
development, configured from XML metadata, while accommodating custom coding wherever
necessary. You can choose to use all or part of the framework in the applications you build,
making the application components much more reusable and flexible. The use of metadata also
enables rules for data bound fields to be specified at the model layer. Labels, validation, and
tooltip properties can be specified in the metadata for ADF data bindings - those properties are
utilized independent of the user interface implementation. In addition, the MDS layer provides
for user experience customization via two different implementation layers: The first, would be
“seeded customization” which refers to an application wide customization that would be in effect
for anyone accessing the application for a particular group. The second is “user customization”
often referred to as “personalization” in which the end user designates customizations to their
personal experience that are then persisted via the MDS repository.
Enhanced Reusability – JDeveloper + ADF provides support for superior reusability features
including: JSF templating, task flows and task flow templating, ADF libraries, JSF fragment based
regions and task flows, and much, much more.
Source availability - Oracle provides the source code for the ADF framework to customers
with a support license. Having the source available can help developers understand the
underlying mechanisms of the framework and debug problems in their applications.

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Support - Oracle ADF is an official Oracle product and as such is serviced by the Oracle
Support organization. This provides around the clock support from an established organization.
Training - Oracle University offers regular instructor lead courses on Oracle ADF and
JDeveloper.

CONCLUSION
Oracle ADF makes Java EE development simpler by providing out of the box implementation
of design patterns and infrastructure code. ADF provides a choice of development approach,
technologies used, and deployment platform. Combining the advanced architecture of Oracle
ADF with the visual development environment of Oracle JDeveloper 11g provides a perfect
solution for both novice and experienced developers looking to be more productive when
developing Java applications.
More resources about Oracle ADF and Oracle JDeveloper can be found on the Oracle
Technology Network (OTN), at http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev.

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Oracle Application Development Framework
Overview
July 2009
Author: Shaun O’Brien
Contributing Authors: Shay Shmeltzer
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