Oracle ADF Tutorial

Oracle JDeveloper ADF Tutorial

Welcome to Oracle ADF Tutorials. The objective of these tutorials is to provide an in-depth understanding of Oracle ADF.

In addition to free Oracle ADF Tutorials, we will cover common interview questions, issues, and how to’s of Oracle ADF.

Introduction

• Oracle Application Development Framework or ADF provides developers the middleware interface for building Oracle 11g. The Oracle ADF course plans from Firebox are structured for real-world applications and the custom course-ware leads to productive applications in real-time.
• Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) is an end-to-end application framework that builds on Java EE standards and open-source technologies to simplify and accelerate implementing enterprise applications. Oracle ADF is suitable for enterprise developers who want to create applications that search, display, create, modify, and validate data using the web, mobile, and desktop interfaces.
• You can use the whole Oracle ADF framework to create an application, or you can use parts of the framework in combination with other technologies. Throughout this guide, applications that contain any ADF technologies are generally referred to as ADF applications. Web applications that incorporate ADF technologies throughout the business service, model, controller, and view layers are referred to as Fusion web applications.

ADF Model

ADF Model is a central part of Oracle ADF, enabling you to create ADF applications based on different types of business services. ADF Model implements data controls and data bindings. Data controls abstract the implementation technology of a business service by using standard metadata interfaces to describe the service's operations and data collections, including information about the properties, methods, and types involved. In Oracle JDeveloper, developers can view that information as icons that they can easily drag and drop onto a page. When the developer drags the representation of the service onto the page, Oracle JDeveloper automatically creates the bindings from the page to the services. At runtime, the ADF Model layer reads the information describing the application's data controls and data bindings from appropriate XML files and implements the two-way connection between the user interface and the application's business service.

Oracle ADF provides ready-to-use data control implementations for common business service technologies, such as the following:

• ADF Business Components
• Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) session beans and JPA Persistence API entities
• JavaBeans components
• Web services (SOAP and REST)

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ADF Architecture

A typical MVC application contains the following three layers.

1. Model layer that holds the business logic.
2. View the layer that handles the user interface.
3. The controller layer manages the interaction between the Model and View layers. -

All the components of the application are loosely coupled. This helps with the maintenance of the application and increases the reusability. So the architecture can be defined as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Oracle ADF has four layers in its MVC implementation. It has a separate model layer and business service layer to implement service-oriented architecture. So we can define the Oracle ADF architecture as an MVC model with a business service layer. Here are the four layers of ADF architecture

• Business Service layer: This layer handles data from various sources and business logic.
• Model layer: This layer does not handle business logic directly; rather it provides an abstract layer on top of the business service layer. This particular design pattern helps the view and controller to work with various business service implementations.
• Controller layer: It controls the web application flow.
• View layer: It provides the user interface.

Different layers and their interaction are shown as an example. The components in different layers can be changed per the application requirement.

Business Service Layer

The business service layer is the additional component in the Oracle ADF framework. ADF provides the flexibility to implement this layer using any technology, and some of those technologies are shown in the diagram. This layer manages the following tasks.

• Interaction with the data persistence layer
• Object-relational mapping
• Transaction management
• Business logic execution

Model Layer

The model layer provides a single interface to connect to any business service. This model layer in the ADF architecture does not handle business logic itself, rather provides the abstraction on top of the business services. So the flexibility of implementing any business service is a great advantage of the ADF framework. The model layer in ADF is also called 'ADF binding'. It has the following components.

• Data controls: It provides an abstraction on top of business service layers
• Data bindings: It exposes data control methods to the UI layer.

Oracle ADF Interview Questions

Controller Layer

The controller layer is responsible for handling application flow and user input. The navigation rules are defined on a diagram to manage application flow. Here are the two types of controllers used in web-based applications.

• JSF controller
• ADF controller

Note: ADF controller extends the functionality of JSF controllers.

View Layer

The view layer is the front end of any application. The front end layer can be a desktop application, mobile application, or web-based application. The multichannel support of the Oracle ADF framework is very useful for developing any type of application. Oracle ADF provides more than 150 Ajax based, ready-made JSF components for creating dynamic web interfaces.

Business Development Service

Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Business Components is a framework focused on creating objects, which implement the Business Services layer on top of a database, 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 Business Components let us leverage the full power of SQL when building Java objects that access their databases. With the built-in implementation of common J2EE design patterns in the framework, the performance and scalability of the application are assured.

Benefits of the Oracle ADF Framework

The following are some of the benefits of the Oracle ADF framework:

• Support for visual and declarative view and controller development
• Various options to construct business service layers
• End to end solution for all the Java EE layers
• Technology and platform independence
• Meta data-driven development
• Support for reusability and flexibility.