What is Oracle announcing? Oracle
is announcing the donation of ADF Faces to the Apache Software
Foundation. ADF Faces is a rich set of UI components based on the
JavaServer Faces specification. This donation will be licensed under
the Apache
2.0 license. The donation was originally part of Oracle ADF, what
it will be called in the future will soon be democratically
determined by the Apache MyFaces community.
What is Apache MyFaces? Apache
MyFaces is an open source JavaServer Faces (JSF) implementation or
run-time. Another popular JSF implementation is Sun’s Reference
Implementation (RI).
What is JavaServer Faces? JavaServer
Faces (JSF) is an industry standard and a framework for building
component-based user interfaces for web applications. The JSF
specification defines a set of APIs representing UI components and
managing their state, handling events and input validation, defining
page navigation, and supporting internationalization and
accessibility. The first iteration of JSF was defined via the Java
Specification Request (JSR) 127
and the next generation (JSF 1.2) is being defined by the JSR
252 expert group.
What is ADF Faces? Oracle Oracle
Application Development Framework (ADF) is a comprehensive
productivity layer for J2EE developers. ADF implements the
Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and 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
and offers a visual and declarative approach to J2EE development. ADF
Faces is the ADF view technology based on JavaServer Faces (JSF).
Oracle ADF Faces is a rich set of JSR-127 compliant UI components.
Oracle has been an active and influent vendor in this JSR since day
one.
Why is this announcement
important? This is going to give a big boost to the JavaServer
Faces technology as well as the MyFaces project. The donated code
comes with very useful functionality out of the box. Essentially the
ADF Faces donation to Apache is a subset of ADF Faces that comes with
commercial quality components, a dialog framework, as well as
personalization and skinning capabilities. Essentially anyone who
downloads ADF Faces from Apache gets the following free of charge:
file upload support, client-side validation, partial rendering of a
page (AJAX-style), data tables, hierarchical tables, color/date
pickers, progress indicators, menu tabs/buttons, wizards,
internationalization and accessibility. A complete list of the ADF
Faces components is available (here.).This
donation starts with more than 100 components which have already been
documented and thoroughly tested.
What’s in it for
Oracle? Oracle believes in Java, our middleware and tools
strategy relies heavily on the Java platform. We also believe JSF is
the most promising user interface technology. Java needs to have a
good component based UI framework to compete with .Net. In order for
JSF to be successful and accelerate its adoption, Oracle decided to
provide (free of charge) a rich set of UI components to help web
application developers who choose JavaServer Faces. Therefore we
decided to get behind JSF and MyFaces by making the ADF Faces
donation to Apache. Moving forward, we are hoping that this open
source contribution will spark additional interest and that more
vendors are going to join the MyFaces project and strengthen the
Faces community.
What tools can I use with the donated
components? Obviously Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3 supports ADF
Faces with its visual JSF editor. In addition to JDeveloper Oracle
leads the Eclipse JSF design-time project under the Web Tools
Platform (WTP). We are going to ensure that ADF Faces components are
supported in the Eclipse environment as well. This said, ADF Faces
can be used from any text editor or IDE of your choice. The
components do not have any dependency on any specific development
environment.
Why did you choose to support Eclipse if
you have your own tools? At Oracle, we believe that having a
choice is a good thing. For those developers who choose to use
Eclipse instead of JDeveloper, we want to ensure that their
experience when building and deploying JSF-based user interfaces is
as rewarding as possible.
Does this announcement mean that
Oracle is less committed to ADF Faces? Absolutely not. ADF in
general and ADF Faces in particular are key components of Oracle
Fusion Middleware which is the foundation of our next generation
E-Business Suite (Oracle Fusion). In addition to committing resources
to help with the ADF Faces donation to Apache, Oracle remains deeply
committed to delivering a high quality UI framework based on our
Apache contribution.
Where can I get commercial support for the
ADF Faces components donated to Apache? Even though ADF Faces
was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, it continues to be
part of Oracle ADF. In addition to the support provided by the Apache
community, ADF Faces users can purchase commercial support from
Oracle. Oracle application server licensees and ADF licensees are
entitled to commercial support of shipping versions of ADF Faces.
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