About J2EE Application Clients and Oracle ADF

The View layer is that part of the J2EE application that end users of your application interact with:

For Web applications, the UI is ultimately displayed as HTML rendered by a browser, where the displayed data is pulled from business services in the model layer.
For Java client applications, which run standalone, the UI consists of Swing components, into which data from business services in the model layer is pushed.

Overall, the view layer for these applications is responsible for:

Referencing the Oracle ADF bindings in the model layer through the UI components
Rendering the data in the appropriate format for each UI component to display
Communicating with the controller layer to handle user interactions, including editing data and navigating the page flow of the application
Optionally, handling validation of data entered into the UI components ( known as client-side validation)

When you create J2EE applications in JDeveloper, the design time tools help to simplify the task of creating a databound client. Without needing to write code, client developers can assemble databound web pages and Java clients. The client-design task is aided by the JDeveloper design time and its cooperation with the Oracle ADF model layer. Without needing to understand the inner workings of the ADF model layer, client developers can insert UI components that access actions and data in selected business services. The process for creating databound clients is the same in JDeveloper for any of these supported client technologies:

Generic JSP pages that use HTML elements and, optionally, JSP tags from JSP custom tag libraries
Web pages based on ADF UIX (the Oracle XML-web presentation framework available in JDeveloper)
Java clients created with Swing components and extended by ADF JClient (the Oracle Java client framework available in JDeveloper)

To learn how JDeveloper makes it easy to use the ADF model layer with the UI components of each client type, see About the Data Control Palette.

For additional design issues and guidelines for browser clients, locate this web page in your browser:

http://java.sun.com/blueprints/guidelines/designing_enterprise_applications_2e/client-tier/client-tier4.html

For additional design issues and guidelines for Java clients, locate this web page in your browser:

http://java.sun.com/blueprints/guidelines/designing_enterprise_applications_2e/client-tier/client-tier5.html