Oracle Application Development Framework

Oracle's solution to the ever-increasing complexity of the J2EE platform is the Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF). Based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design patterns for interactive applications, Oracle ADF lets application developers focus on the application rather than on the underlying technologies. Oracle ADF increases the cooperation between the MVC layers both in the design time and the runtime while easing the incorporation of complex business services into the application model layer. By using visual, declarative, and guided-coding techniques, developers who are not necessarily J2EE experts can quickly become productive.

Specifically, ADF offers these benefits to J2EE application development:

• Provides a thin-model layer that adapts diverse business services, thus permitting views to be created in a similar fashion, independent from their data source

• Optionally, provides transaction control support to the model layer and permits web applications to scale better

• Cooperates with the highly visual design tools in the JDeveloper IDE and enables an integrated view of the entire J2EE application project

Standards-Based

The framework is completely based on industry standards. In contrast to traditional development frameworks, Oracle ADF is also more flexible and extensible. Using standard Expression Language (EL) syntax for web clients and standard Swing components for Java GUI clients, Oracle ADF enables you to work seamlessly with many different server-side technologies, including Oracle ADF Business Components, Oracle Application Server TopLink, Enterprise JavaBeans, web services, and Java objects.

You manipulate the application's metadata using productive visual tools, while the framework executes the application in the most efficient manner, using proven design patterns. Not only can Oracle ADF applications be deployed to any J2EE server, and be connected to any SQL database, the framework itself uses standard J2EE APIs, design patterns, code, and metadata.

The role of Oracle ADF, in part, is to support deployed applications that fit into the robust, scalable, and flexible architecture of the J2EE platform. You can use Oracle ADF to build applications that target one or all of the tiers in the J2EE platform with your choice of implementation technologies. For example, using Oracle ADF Business Components to implement your business services, you are able to deploy them as JavaBeans, EJB session beans, or web services at any time without code changes.