Just having ‘fun’ today exploring the new framework Oracle has launched a little time back. For some time Oracle JDeveloper 10.1.3 EA (Early Access) has been available. It boasts the new stack of technology for Oracle. The technology stack (for us) consist of:
- Business Components (ADF BC)
- JSR-227 (The binding layer)
- ADF Faces (Oracle’s JSD implementation
Nice to play with but it is giving me quick some headaches. JSF is quite different from Struts as we used previously and JSF resembles ADF UIX (Oracles view layer in JDeveloper 10.1.2) but works very differently.
As i’m just randomly rambling on now i’ll let you share my experiences and big bone-headed blunders.
First of all… The development environment has been revamped. I quite like it, but i’m kind of partial to JDeveloper (oppossed to some co-workers). Refactoring has been extended quite a bit and they included the one feature i liked from Eclipse: double clicking on a title expands that window…
Secondly i started lookign at Business Components, not much new here, anybody that has worked with ADF BC in 10.1.2 should have no problem jumping in here.
Now the changes started: JSF! or in other words: ADF Faces… Completely back to the drawing board for me. Everything works a little different. A button on a page can call a method, back where does that method go? For my own purposes i made a mental mapping between the Struts Action and the JSF backing bean. All the code for the page goes in there. Just double click on the button and a method will be made for you (reminded me of those visual basic editors ). Now the problems started: i wanted to get at my data… but where was it stored? UIX gave you a nice event context from with you could get everything. The event context of JSF contains about nothing… However the OTN Forums helped me along. You need to leverage the strengths of JSF to get a connection to the bindings layer. You need to create a managed property in your managed JSF bean that is filled with #{bindings}. A presto the magic happens.
So far so good… we have a working data layer (ADF BC) and a ready to go binding layer (using JSR-227) to go and build our application.
I’ll keep you informed.
December 21st, 2005 at 2:34 pm
Let me know if you run into any problems in your experimentations!