Application Development Framework is a proprietary 4th
Generation java programming Language from Oracle. ADF is a metadata driven
language, meaning it is fully controlled by XML files. My blog on ADF is
intended to developers having prior experience in java and other frameworks
like Spring or Structs.
If you
want to learn ADF, you have to understand the basic of 4GL. The main goal of
4GL is to make programmers life easy by using a smart and intelligent IDE which
is capable for doing most of the work for you. As a programmer, what you have
to do is control the behavior of these business components generated by the IDE
by using appropriate properties. Jdeveloper is the IDE used by Oracle for
building ADF applications. Why Jdeveloper? The answer is very simple, Oracle want
a smart and intelligent IDE for integrating the features of declarative
development. Also one major advantage of ADF is to use Groovy to control the
behavior of ADF components.
When I
started working on ADF with prior experience in other framework like Spring and
Structs, most of the time I was searching for good blogs or documents
explaining about the core internal details of the ADF framework and I failed to
get those. So I thought of putting some details on ADF by using this blog and
that will help other programmer like me who is coming from other java framework
background.
XML is
a common language used by all the programming languages and it is a right
choice for Oracle to choose this as one of the building block. We use Oracle
JDeveloper to create xml files at the time of development and this xml
documents are called design time documents or artifacts. ADF Framework uses
this documents at runtime and generates appropriate business objects. So it is
very important to understand the design time document and runtime object’s
behavior when we are dealing with ADF.
ADF have two core parts in any
web application, i.e ADF BC or it is otherwise called ADFm and ADF View or it
is otherwise called ADFv. ADFm is dealing with the business layer and ADFv is
dealing with presentation layer of the web application. Understanding of both of
these components is critical if you are going to develop the ADF web
application. So this ADF tutorial blog consists of two parts ADFm and ADFv. We
will cover other parts like ADF Web services and SOA at appropriate time.
