Introduction: Book Review – Developing Web Applications with Oracle ADF Essentials

I’ve been doing a lot of practical exercises for the past few weeks regarding  JSF, specifically using the Seam Framework. Yet what I’m more intrigue about is the Oracle’s own Implementation of JSF called Oracle ADF (application development framework).

Experience with it?

I had some hands on experience with it in the past. I was trained for Oracle WebCenter Portal (basically the Enterprise Portal Solution of Oracle) and it uses Oracle ADF extensively in its core.  I was tasked back then to spearhead the implementation of Oracle WebCenter – I created the initial framework, setup, tech archiecture as well as the environment for Oracle WebCenter development. Its such a shame though that it did not push through. Although I wasn’t able to use the technology, I did find it very amusing and interesting – I even tried to create a Portal app of my own and create tutorial slides, but of course it was never really close to being one of my course skill.

A lull came when a particular publishing company contacted me to review their Book regarding Oracle ADF essentials. It was one of my goals to review and publish books of my expertise and this is a great start for me to do that.

So with the topic itself, for the new few days, I’ll try to document everything I learn and found out so far when reviewing the book. Hopefully, it will turn out great. Hopefully, this will be the key to my publisher / book author career. 🙂

The Book itself!

The Books is titled: Developing Web Applications with Oracle ADF Essentials by PACKT publishing – Author is Sten E. Vesterli

I read the introductory part of the book and I would say that there’s a lot of motivation behind the creation of this book. The author is a self proclaimed ADF Enthusiast and consider it as his core skill in his career. It was reviewed by number of peers that are highly regarded in their respective field – Eugene Fedorenko – Senior Analyst, Amr Gawish – Senior Oracle Fusion Middleware Consultant and Dimitrios Stasinopoulos – a Certified ADF implementation specialist. From their title alone, you can see that the very reason of the books existence. It was reviewed by technical expert of the field and the technology itself. Much like any other technical books (at least the majority of which), it came with a support files (ebooks, discount offers, downloadable samples). These support files will entirely help any person who uses and wish to learn the technology.

The Chapters!

By looking at the table of contents and chapters – users who wishes to learn the technology will ultimately be interested from the get go. It tackles real world examples as well as beginners journal / entry to the technology. It uses Open source software such as MySQL, GlassFish and the most stable JDK as of this writing, Java 7.

1. Chapter 1: Basics – Develop your first ADF Essential Application
2. Chapter 2: Creating business services – using JDeveloper and ADF underlying technological components.
3. Chapter 3: Creating Task flows – essential for creating process driven applications
4. Chapter 4: Addition the business logic – Tackles the essentials of creating business logic using the pre-defined set of rules of governance to create such components.
5. Chapter 5: Building Enterprise Applications – build the structure of your code, apply design patterns, use ADF controls to create an enterprise grade applications. This chapter tackles on the activities (preferred ones) on building Enterprise Applications.
6. Chapter 6: Debugging ADF Applications – the means of debugging is a general activity for every developer. One must know how to debug, set breakpoints and modify the controls to create the ultimate, valued solution.
7. Chapter 7: Security – Enterprise applications must be secured since it can be used to manage highly sensitive data. This chapter will focus on implementing security controls on your application.
8. Chapter 8: Build and Deploy – Finally, build your application and deploy them to a live environment. This chapter will help you create a build and deploy scheme to successfully run the application on a live environment.

I’ll try to be informative as I progress with the review  and put some of my example up here!