ADF Business Components Benefits in a Nutshell

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ADF Business Tier Technology Choices

Regardless of your choice of implementation technology in the backend business service tier, Oracle ADF offers much developer productivity goodness in the form of our standards-based, declarative data binding layer, rich Struts integration, and the Oracle JDeveloper 10g visual tools that support these. These framework facilities work the same at design time and run time for all of our supported technology options for your back-end business service implementations.

It's important to understand that all but one of our technology options for the ADF business service tier are non-prescriptive in nature. In a nutshell, non-prescriptive means that they don't impose a particular implementation approach to building your end-to-end J2EE application. Our non-prescriptive choices in the ADF business-tier include:

• POJO's ("plain ol' Java Objects") mapped with Oracle TopLink
• EJB Session Bean (which can also use TopLink for CMP or POJO inside)
• Web Services
• Simple Java Classes (mapped using any other technique you prefer, or perhaps not even mapped: just transient beans)

With a non-prescriptive option for building your business service, you have the freedom to decide yourself which approach to use to solve common end-to-end J2EE application-building problems and implement appropriate J2EE Design Patterns code to simplify these use cases in your application code.

Our one prescriptive option for the business service tier — especially apropos for corporate developers, ISVs, and VARs skilled in 4GL client/server development tools like Oracle Forms, PowerBuilder, and Visual Basic, looking for maximum developer productivity — is our ADF Business Components functionality.

What are the ADF Business Components?

ADF Business Components are business-tier building-block classes, and related design-time extensions to JDeveloper, that give you a prescriptive architecture for building richly-functional and cleanly layered J2EE business services with great performance. ADF BC provides a foundation of lightweight Java classes (and corresponding XML-driven bean factories) that your business-tier application components can extend to leverage a robust implementation of the numerous design patterns you need to:

• Declaratively design master/detail UI data model, including only data needed by client for optimum performance
• Automatically coordinate client data model changes with business domain object layer
• Synchronize pending data changes across multiple views of data
• Implement end-user query-by-example data filtering without code
• Declaratively enforce required fields, primary key uniqueness, data precision/scale, and foreign key references
• Simplify application security with automatic JAAS integration and audit maintenance
• Consistently apply prompts, tooltips, format masks, and error messages in any application
• "Write once, deploy any": use the same business service as lightweight class, EJB session bean, or web service
• Switch from 2-tier to 3-tier deployment with no client code changes
• Enforce best-practice interface-based programming style
• Reduce network traffic for remote clients through efficient batch operations
• Easily capture and enforce both simple and complex business rules, programmatically or declaratively
• Simplify on-site customization of delivered applications with easy patching support
• Handle images, video, sound, and documents with no code
• Simplify multi-step web-based business transactions with automatic web-tier state management

Productivity With Choice in Action

If your team has already has implemented solutions for many of these features, or happens to be building an application that doesn't require them, then ADF's pluggable business tier support allow them to opt for one of our other non-prescriptive technology choices instead. It's all part of our modular, "productivity with choice" approach that makes JDeveloper 10g unique among J2EE application-building tools.

ADF Books, Training, and Workshops

You can learn more about Oracle ADF from these useful resources on the Oracle Technology Network:

• Oracle JDeveloper Books and Courses
• Building Oracle ADF Applications Workshop
• ADF Data Binding Primer and ADF/Struts Overview
• More Advanced Best Practices 'ADF Toy Store' Demo and Whitepaper
• Oracle Developer Community Blogs