Oracle OpenWorld 2009: Analysis from an ADF Perspective

31 Oct 2009 by Simon Haslam (in Events)  |  Comments (1)

As mentioned in my last post Oracle OpenWorld 2009, and specifically the iDevelop 'sub-conference,' had a lot to offer for people building enterprise applications with ADF. These were my ADF highlights: an excellent ADF debugging session by ADF-guru Steve Muench, two very good sessions on experiences from the Fusion Apps development teams (Steve Muench, Duncan Mills), a useful session on ADF re-use by Lynn Munsinger, some advanced ADF UI presentations by Frank Nimphius and Matthias Wessendorf, a detailed walk through of what's in, and coming, to the Team Productivity Center software by Susan Duncan, discussions about forthcoming (November) JDeveloper/ADF 11.1 Patchset 1 release, the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group sessions (of course!), e.g. see Shay Shmeltzer's blog. There were also a number of WebCenter presentations which are significant to people interested in ADF because WebCenter Spaces is built with ADF Faces on top of EJB/JPA (unfortunately I couldn't attend those at the time but most are available online from Oracle OpenWorld On Demand).

Some of the improvements coming in JDeveloper/ADF 11.1 Patchset 1 are:

• a new layout page control (looks like a much improved version of the old 10.1.3 af:PanelPage) to simplify page and template set up,
• the new Fusion look and feel (i.e. an additional skin with more blue instead of olive colours),
• active data services which push back-end database changes to the user's page (Frank Nimphius did a demo - the changed data blinked yellow automatically as it was updated),
• ADF Faces improvements such as Auto Suggest,
  
• improved eventing to co-ordinate changes between page regions,
• a degree of Maven support,
• the facility to add dummy data to pages to assist applicaiton mock-ups (see Duncan Mills' presentation at OOW),
  
• ADF Mobile: a new method to build ADF applications that can run, say, on a phone, whilst disconnected from the network. Currently the support is expected to be for Blackberry and WindowsMobile devices though it's likely to be available on java-based phones at some point too (i.e. Android but not iPhone as that doesn't run java). Note you can already run ADF applications from a web browser on a mobile phone now (with some restrictions) provided you are connected to a network.
  

There are supposed to be more than 550 new features in PS1 so obviously this is just scratching the surface.

Larry Ellison's keynote showed off the first of the Fusion Applications. One final observation is that, given their 'olive' appearance, I expect they are built with 11.1 ADF production and not PS1. Where we have seen snippets of Fusion Apps over the past 18 months they have typically been using pre-release versions of ADF 11g. This supports my view that, after seeing very significant changes to the ADF UI in particular over the last couple of years, we will now go through a period of consolidation and more modest, evolutionary updates.

This has to be good news for people starting to build applications on ADF (11g) instead of, say, Forms. Now that Oracle has a very significant amount of ADF application development under its belt, lessons learnt have been fed back into the tooling so that ADF has reached a good degree of functional maturity.