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!

Oracle WebCenter 11g – Twitter Feed Data

I’ve been trying to learn Oracle WebCenter and ADF using JDeveloper for quite some time now, and it seems that its becoming clear to me that this thing called  “Data Controls” (which at first I never thought is important in any of these) is actually the key that holds the truth about the power of Oracle ADF 11g. 🙂

Heres a video on developing a portlet with Twitter Feed inside. 🙂

Key Notes:

1. Add the WebCenter Porlet Web Service for any Fusion Project to add portlet integration capabilities.
2. RSS feeds is an XML document and uses XSD (XML Schema Definition)
3. Oracle JDeveloper has a way to pull the XSD from an existing XML document.
4. Our XML document along with an XSD can be a source of Data Controls – remember, XML is a universal format that can be used in a universal way (it can contain schema Data or just plain text).
5. ADF components uses Data Controls – thus, if we do have the Data Controls, we can use them to develop ADF applications.
6. Go to the info page to get the WSDL (v1 or v2).
7. We need these WSDL to register out portlet to our WebCenter Instance
8. Once we register this portlet, users can see and add these portlet via Composer.

I’ll be posting some tutorials for these as soon as I can. 🙂