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Friday, July 03, 2009

Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF)

Four Cornerstone announces Java / Oracle (ADF) Development and Forms Modernization Team

Your applications need to be flexible enough to rapidly respond to changing business needs. And you expect your development teams to create these applications quickly and at the lowest cost, following the latest industry standards.

Oracle has in the past answered this need for flexibility through tools like Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Designer; but as industry standards change, the best road to attain this flexibility while continuing to follow Oracle’s lead, is to start moving toward using Oracle Fusion.

Oracle Fusion seeks to unify an organization’s disparate technologies through the use of web-services. At the core of the web service implementations and also new application written is the ADF technology. With ADF you can build new applications and also expand or replace old applications. This mentality is part of Oracle big Fusion “push.” Oracle has been and promises to continue being a technological pace-setter.

While Oracle is not insisting Oracle Forms applications be migrated, they are pouring their corporate dollars into the expansion of their Fusion suite. Oracle’s plans for the future do not include Forms in a big and visionary way. For example, Oracle currently employs literally thousands of developers working to make their Fusion vision become a reality; compare the number of developers assigned to improve the Oracle Forms product – probably two orders of magnitude less. So one might deduce that Forms applications need to be replaced – particularly before Oracle insists on it!

Four Cornerstone built an ADF development and Forms Modernization team in order to support organizations who feel, as we do, that Forms/Reports applications will, sooner or later, need replacement with Fusion applications in order to remain supportable.

Oracle ADF (Application Development Framework)

Oracle ADF implements best practices to help developers design and build secure, high-performance J2EE applications and Web services for the enterprise. Oracle ADF delivers significant productivity gains. This gives you the ability to meet business demands rapidly while increasing your ROI.

Specifically, the Oracle ADF includes tools at each level of the MVC pattern to promote developer productivity enhancement. At the Business Component (persistence) layer, Four Cornerstone is partnering with Oracle to offer ADF/BC and related consulting services. ADF/BC is a persistence layer technology which was designed with Forms (and other 4GL) programmers in mind. As the developer refines an application’s persistence layer, the dialogs and wizards accelerate learning of the ADF/BC technology, and how to use it. 4GL programmers are more used to wizards and dialogs for helping them get 70% of their work done, and then turning to code for the remaining 30%. In addition to quickly increasing the productivity of non-Java programmers within a Java realm, ADF/BC gives these developers the capability to drive business logic to the business component layer, rather than implementing business logic at the Model level in backing/managed beans.

At the controller layer, ADF also includes a JSR2270-extension, which allows the quick connection of business component and model layer business services, to view/presentation-layer components. In Oracle this is done in a declarative and meta-data-driven way, much of which is automated, when a component is dragged and dropped on to the page canvas. While some coaching is needed to detail the fine points of this layer, this is generally a boon, increasing developer productivity by allowing them to capitalize on Oracle’s discoveries of what it takes to productively develop with a J2EE environment.

And at the top-most layer ADF Faces components are productivity-boosters. There are a huge number of these components. The whole idea behind creating a JSF custom component is to incorporate useful and stable implementations of functionality into a standard package that is usable in a variety of settings. Oracle has done with with ADF Faces components. And with the new ADF Rich Faces components, they are doing it again! With the suite of GUI JSF components that Oracle offers, developers will have ready at their disposal a host of functionality in neat little packages, that will maximize production of useful web pages, and minimize downtime spent troubleshooting and standardizing their own component suite. Although…that option is always available through JSF as well: to develop additional components; or even to incorporate additional components as needed from third-party component builders.

Each of these components in the ADF Faces suite has many additional and useful properties to help different kinds of developers quickly declare how they want to use a particular component without the bother of writing a lot of code, or instantiating things, or preparing frameworks, or any other overhead of that type.

And Four Cornerstone will be there to help you use this great framework.

Our team is one of the first software companies in the world that has worked with ADF. We are in the position today to use this framework optimally, due to an unequaled knowledge of ADF best practices, developed with experience and careful study of the framework. These practices include code reuse, self-developed standard templates for often-utilized functionality, and proper utilization of J2EE and Java capabilities. We are offering a real alternative to the classic Oracle Developer (Forms or Reports), without having to deal with expansive development efforts or a lessened maintainability.

Oracle / Java Consulting, Development and Support Services

Four Cornerstone's expert consultants and developers are experienced with the Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server, JDeveloper, and open-source Oracle frameworks, such as TopLink (object-relational mapping framework) and Oracle ADF Faces (JSF-based component library). We can help you build solid, scalable and secure applications, using Java EE standards, such as JSF and EJB3, as well as some of the best Oracle products and technologies that significantly increase developer productivity.

Our seasoned consultants and developers have a very good understanding of how Oracle and Java EE technologies work. Knowing what happens under the hood allows us to make the right choices while architecting and developing your application. We use best practices and perform extensive testing to guarantee a very good quality of the code that makes your application easy to maintain. The code our developers produce is well documented and it's easy to modify it when new user requirements must be implemented or when existing business logic must be changed.

We take security very seriously and think of it right from the start. Security policies are implemented as early as possible and everything is fully documented so that you can easily review it. We'll make every possible effort to ensure that your data and intellectual property will be safe.

We also provide JSF / Struts Consulting, Web 2.0 / AJAX Consulting, Java / XML Consulting and we help our clients create Rich Web UIs based on AJAX and DHTML. In many cases, the browser-based access to an enterprise application is much more efficient with the help of AJAX, leading to faster application responses and increased user productivity.

To find out how we can assist in your development needs, please call 817-377-1144 or email info@fourcornerstone.com.