Abstract
This presentation was created to help Oracle Forms Developers transition their current
Oracle Forms skill set to the next version of forms development called Application
Development Framework (ADF). ADF has been around since 2004 but most Oracle
Forms Developers are just now having to learn ADF because Oracle is developing future
applications and products using a new technology stack which supports ADF. ADF is
based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) set of standards. This means that
Oracle Forms Developers will need to transition their existing skill sets and/or acquire
new skill sets to develop applications and forms in a Web based environment. In others
words, Oracle Forms Developers will need to be become Web Developers and this white
paper will help you start your journey into becoming a Web Developer via ADF.
In order to build ADF applications, Oracle has provided a new integrated development
environment (IDE) called JDeveloper. JDeveloper is similar to Oracle Forms in that its
purpose is to simplify application development by providing a visual and declarative
approach to building your application or form. Unlike the Oracle Forms tool which can
build Oracle Forms applications, JDeveloper includes a development environment that
supports SQL, PL/SQL, Java, XML, HTML, JavaScript, BPEL, and PHP. Since
JDeveloper is a multi-purpose IDE tool, you will be intimidated by the layout, menu
options, profile options and wizards, as compared to the existing E-Business Suite
environment where there is a separate IDE for each Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Oracle
Workflow and XML Gateway.
From my experience, some of your Oracle Forms skill sets can transition very easily
while others will be a challenge. In addition, there are several new skills to learn and
based on your past experience and/or education with Web Development, the learning
curve can be fairly short but in most cases it will require an extended amount of effort.
Remember when you first started developing in Oracle Forms, it took only a few days to
build a simple form but it took you months or years to master it. The same can be applied
to building ADF forms and applications. In fact, it will take longer to master ADF
because there are hundreds of more components and services to learn.
This white paper will highlight the skill sets required to build your ADF application,
steps required to set up your development environment, basic navigation of the Oracle
JDeveloper software, building an ADF application with comparison to Oracle Form
development and provide some understanding on how to deploy an ADF application.
Objective
- What are the challenges with transitioning from Oracle Forms to Oracle ADF?
- How to learn the required programming skill set to build ADF applications?
- What are the basic ADF concepts?
- Provide side by side comparisons between Oracle Forms and Oracle ADF.
- Provide links to relevant websites explaining key concepts.
Author: Tom Korbecki