Last friday and saturday LogicaCMG organised an internal RADRace. The man who made the assignment was nobody other than Ivan Verborgh, the man who makes the assignments for the international RADRace.

The assignment was to make a webbased application with which people could apply for a license plate. It had to contain at least:

• Multi-lingual screens
• A webservice for checking credit card codes
• Role based authorisation, different functions for different roles
• Wizard like registration process
• And of course lots of business rules

Last year we (Reza Ahmadi and I) entered using Oracle Designer and Oracle Forms (after realising we didn’t have enough knowledge of Oracle ADF) and had the pleasure to win.

This year we (Gideon Liem and I) entered using Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.2 and the Oracle ADF framework. We had prepared a kick-start application that contained a new look-and-feel (Using custom renderers in UIX) and some authentication method.

From there we built almost the complete application. In the end the following stack of technologies were used:

• Oracle Database 10g (as the big Datastore, we can use another database?)
• Oracle OC4J stand-alone (as the application server)
• A small SMTP server, called JES
• Oracle ADF Business Components (as the persistence layer)
• Oracle’s implementation of JSR-227 (as the binding layer, between the persistence and the view layer)
• Oracle ADF UIX (as the view layer layer)
• Apache Axis (as the webservice engine)
• Apache jUDDI (as the webservice registry)
• UDDI4j from Sourceforge (communication with the registry)
• Apache WSIF (communication with the webservice)
• Apache POI (generating Excel reports)

One of the things that were most difficult for us was the refactoring of the data. Ivan had prepared the challenge in a way that we got the data as two big denormalised tables. Part of the challenge was to normalise the data so you could use it for your application. It took us the morning of the first day and the first hour of the afternoon to get the database right.

After that the framework kicked in: generation of the persistence layer is really a breeze. When you just had the rule of thumb to code your screens on your tables (don’t think in Objects if you got tables… it makes sence to see the whole picture and combine the two). UIX pages are the view layer we used in projects the last year and we have become quite proficient with them. The binding layer makes it possible to get your model and just drag them tables into the screen and have them work. Most of the time we could do what building an application is about: building the business logic that matters… All else should be simple, easy and quickly done.

Rest us to say we had the pleasure to finish first in the contest. Unfortunatly our competitors that used JHeadstart had to drop out for the second day (for personal reasons), we would have really liked to compare their result with ours.

Runners up were: in second place a microsoft team using Microsoft .NET 2.0 (they also had a good working application) and in third place a Java based team that used LogicaCMG’s own open-source framework: ePlatform.

Photo’s

All the teams and the jury

We, Gideon (right; in white, red & blue) & Robert (left; in grey)

Design is essential

Evaluation by the jury

Success!

Links
Oracle Technology site, you can find the database, application server and JDeveloper here.
Apache, great products here
Sourceforge, also here
bloggingabout.net, another blog sponsered by LogicaCMG that contains a post from the microsoft competitors
ePlatform (on sourceforge), the ePlatform site