At the moment a college has asked me to think with him about a big contract. It’s mainly about the bigger things in development life and forced me to think about developing bigger applications than we have done until now. This fortunately fell together with the talk Duncan Mills had at Guru4Pro (see other article) which also made me look at things in a bigger picture.
I’ve mostly worked on applications that follow the MVC web-app stripe. The Oracle ADF framework can fill this in completely for me. However when we start to live in a less constrained world we have other stuff poking in. Webservices are asked for, ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) is a big bussword here. So i’m looking around for the framework (extensions) that can help me.
I’ve made a little list of things i want to do some research about:
- BPEL: BPEL can solve the *big* SOA problems like asynchronous calls and easy configuration and so on. BPEL processes are exposed as simple webservices. JDeveloper can generate stubs to call webservices, i’ve developed my own way to expose webservices (using Apache Axis) and to call them dynamically (using WSIF) or to do some registry stuff (UDDI4j). So this piece of the bigger picture should not be a big problem.
- JSF knowledge: Still have a lot to learn here. However my main problem, no templating in JSF, could be solved by something called Facelets. Have only heard of them, need to find out about them. Will it work with the Oracle ADF framework?
- Security: Okay as a developer i don’t care about security, but customers do. ACEGI pops up everywhere. Need to look into that. Will it fit in the Oracle ADF framework somewhere?
- And the big one i don’t have a clue about yet. How to integrate Oracle ADF to a Enterprise Service Bus. Still have some thinking to do. Just using Message Driven EJB’s probably won’t cut it. The ESB i’ve heard from was implemented using Oracle Interconnect. Yeah, another Oracle product, that should already be done by them, shouldn’t it? I don’t know yet.
So, these are my thoughts at the moment. However fortunately for the world there are a lot more people out there who are much more intelligent than me. And those people are you. I would like you to give me some pointers on my thoughts. Do you have experience with products that integrate into or work with the Oracle ADF framework for these this? Please leave a comment.
Links
A nice article about integrating BPEL and JSF (written by Chris Schalk)