Oracle ADF is a comprehensive productivity layer for J2EE developers. It simplifies building applications as a set of business services with Web, Wireless, and Rich Client interfaces. ADF accelerates development with ready-to-use J2EE Design Pattern implementations and metadata-driven components that you'd otherwise have to code, test, and debug by hand. Since its implementation is based on standards and its features embody years of experience from Oracle's own business application developers, your ADF-powered applications are high-performance, well-architected, and portable.

Oracle JDeveloper 10g includes integrated visual design tools for ADF, providing a single environment to model, test, debug, tune, maintain, deploy, and version all of the layers of your J2EE application. Oracle ADF provides a flexible, end-to-end application infrastructure that accommodates your technology choices in each architectural layer, and Oracle JDeveloper 10g offers drag and drop ease of use throughout the lifecycle, giving you productivity with choice.

As illustrated in Figure 1, Oracle ADF provides time-saving functionality in all four architectural layers of your J2EE business applications:

• Business Services

  The ADF Business Components technology provides declarative building-blocks you can use to implement scalable business services, data access objects, and business objects that enforce business rules and handle database persistence.

• Model

  The ADF Model layer provides consistent, declarative data-binding against a multiple backend technologies accommodating business services implemented as ADF Application Modules, custom JavaBeans, EJB's, and Web Services.

• View

  The ADF UIX technology provides declarative page definition and a rich UI component set for HTML and wireless UI's, complementing ADF's support for JSP pages and JSP tag libraries like JSTL, Jakarta Struts, ADF DataTags, and others. The ADF JClient layer dovetails with Swing to simplify building sophisticated rich client UI's.

• Controller

  Integrated support for Jakarta Struts allows data-binding and business services to work seamlessly with this popular controller-layer framework, while the ADF Controller layer provides the option of a more sophisticated, fully-declarative page flow engine.

Figure 1: Oracle ADF Application Architecture

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.

While Oracle JDeveloper 10g introduces a consolidated, more flexible runtime framework with Oracle ADF, the new release has also enhanced the design time environment to offer a more consistent and end-to-end visual development experience. Key new features supporting rapid application development include:

• A new visual editor for HTML, JSP, and uiXML pages lets you design your application's web pages interactively.

• A new application navigator helps developers see all of their application sources in a uniform package organization, and simplifies the view of components with multiple implementation files and deployment descriptors to reduce clutter and improve usability for large application projects.

• A new capability to configure the Technology Scope of your projects so the environment can tailor its dialogs to present only the options that are relevant to your chosen technology decisions.

• A new database modeler allows you to design, visualize, and document your database schemas.

• A new UML use case diagrammer helps capture application requirements, and enhanced UML modeling support lets you design all EJB's, Web Services, and all key ADF business components visually.

• A new data binding palette allows consistent drag and drop data binding for all client display types.

• A new visual page flow diagrammer for Jakarta Struts and Oracle ADF Controller lets you build new pages and actions visually and connect them to design the flow of your web user interface.

All of these new design time features, combined with a new drag and drop approach to organize all of your windows more easily, make JDeveloper 10g the premier Rapid Application Development tool for J2EE developers, and the only one offering productivity with choice.

Yes, at several levels. As you create and maintain J2EE applications, you configure the list of preferred technologies by customizing your projects' technology scope. JDeveloper uses your preferences to simplify your design time experience. The tool ships with a number of built-in application templates to configure the preferred technologies, as well as project and package naming standards, for the most common types of J2EE solutions. Users new to J2EE can leverage the default templates to get started quickly with the highest level of declarative development. Advanced J2EE users can choose alternative templates for a more do-it-yourself approach, customizing the defaults if needed, or create their own templates to capture their team's preferred solution technologies for future reuse.

The first release of Oracle ADF will be available as part of Oracle JDeveloper 10g. A Developer Preview release will be available on OTN in Summer 2003. Oracle JDeveloper 10g is scheduled to go production in Q1 CY2004, after incorporating user feedback from the Developer Preview release.

Oracle ADF is licensed as part of Oracle JDeveloper 10g. No separate runtime license from Oracle is required to deploy applications based on Oracle ADF.

Yes. Applications built with Oracle ADF run on any J2EE-compliant application server (including Oracle9iAS, BEA WebLogic, IBM WebSphere, and JBoss). In addition to working with the Oracle and Oracle Lite databases, they can work with non-Oracle databases like IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and others.

You can use Oracle ADF to build applications that target one or all of the tiers in the J2EE platform using your choice of implementation technologies. Using ADF business components to implement your business services, you gain the additional flexibility to be able to deploy them as JavaBeans, EJB Session Beans, or Web Services at any time without code changes.

Oracle ADF consolidates Oracle's existing application frameworks and evolves their functionality to a new level of productivity and flexibility. The ADF Business Components and ADF JClient technologies have been internally refactored to cleanly separate the business services features from the data binding features. This means JSP and uiXML pages, as well as Swing/JClient panels, now all share a common data-binding technology in the ADF Model layer which can work consistently against backend business services of all kinds.

With this approach, developers get a new, consistent way to do visual data-binding in Oracle9i JDeveloper and new flexibility to accommodate services implemented as ADF Application Modules, custom JavaBeans, EJB's, and Web Services. These improvements have been implemented with upward compatibility in mind, so applications built using existing, production versions of BC4J, UIX, and JClient just open and run in Oracle JDeveloper 10g on top of the enhanced Oracle ADF framework, gaining new visual design time features described above.

Absolutely. Oracle is strongly committed to upward compatibility between the current production release and the upcoming release of Oracle JDeveloper 10g. Applications developed using the BC4J, UIX, and JClient frameworks today are compatible with Oracle ADF and will immediately benefit from all of the new visual development features detailed above.

In addition to hundreds of external customers, over 1500 internal applications developers in Oracle's E-Business Suite division have used Oracle's existing frameworks since 1999 to deliver self-service, Web-based business applications on the J2EE platform. While the Oracle9i JDeveloper design time has evolved considerably to provide an even more end-to-end visual and declarative experience, all the core concepts will be familiar to existing users.

Oracle AS TopLink is one of the many technologies that work well in the Oracle ADF architecture. Developers using TopLink as the persistence architecture for their custom Java classes can leverage the common data-binding features in the ADF Model layer to simplify building JSP, uiXML, and Swing application user interfaces. Using the new visual design time editors in Oracle JDeveloper 10g, developers using TopLink can now build web and rich client UI's with drag and drop ease.

More information about JDeveloper and Oracle ADF is available on the Oracle Technology Network.