Oracle ADF Essentials

Oracle has released ADF Essentials: a free to develop and deploy core version of their Application Development Framework.

What is included in Oracle ADF Essentials?

According to the documentation, Oracle ADF Essentials includes the following Oracle ADF components: Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components, Oracle ADF Controller, Oracle ADF Model and Oracle ADF Business Components.

The following functionality, however, is not included in Oracle ADF Essentials, and requires the full Oracle ADF version: Oracle ADF Mobile, Oracle ADF Desktop Integration, Oracle ADF Security, The Oracle ADF Web service data control, Oracle ADF remote taskflows, Oracle ADF Business Component’s Service Interfaces, Oracle ADF Data Controls for BI, Essbase and BAM, Integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware features such as MDS, OPSS, OWSM, Enterprise Manager and MBeans, High Availability and Clustering.

All in all a good base to start from! We now await their cloud solution, so we can develop and deploy our ADF applications in the cloud.

Using Cloudbees behind a proxy

At work, we are sitting behind a proxy. This can be pretty annoying if you have to use services that require the internet, but don't rely on your internet settings. For example Maven, which can be configured using it's settings.xml file, or the Cloudbees SDK.

That last one is a bit trickier to use behind a proxy. There is no obvious settings.xml or properties file where you can define your proxy server. The solution, however, is very simple. Go to your Cloudbees SDK root folder, and edit the bees.bat file. Change the JAVA_OPTS to the following:

JAVA_OPTS=-Dbees.home=%BEES_HOME% -Dhttp.proxyHost=<your proxy host> -Dhttp.proxyPort=<your proxy port> -Xmx256m

Save the changes, and when you run the bees command from the console now, it will use your proxy settings. Easy as that!

ADF analyzed by Gartner

Gartner has recently published their analysis of Oracle's Application Development Framework. And while the general feelings towards ADF are rather hesitating, the Gartner conclusion is overall very positive. Of course, ADF is tightly coupled with Oracle's Fusion Middleware stack and JDeveloper (although an Eclipse plugin is available). But just because of those reasons, you can count on Oracle to continue developing and supporting ADF in the future.

A special mention goes to the MetaData Services provided in Fusion Middleware. It's an engine that allows users to personalize their own web-experience. Much like portals intend to do, but then in 'a regular' web application. It allows runtime customization of the look-and-feel, per user, group of users or the entire application.

Further, Gartner looks forward to the much anticipated ADF Mobile. They expect it to ship with the 12c release of ADF. As you could see earlier on my blog, I'm attending OpenWorld this year, and I hope to see some more details about ADF Mobile there.

So all in all a positive review of ADF. Let's hope customers also see the added value of the framework, and at least consider adapting it. Especially when an Oracle stack is already present, the step to start using ADF is not very big.