The Art of Self-preservation

This post is aimed at all those poor souls that find themselves facing Oracle ADF coming from a PL/SQL background (Forms, APEX or plain old database development).

Normal First Reactions
Despair. Most of us have felt it in the beginning, and it is considered perfectly normal. The feeling of constant despair will diminish slightly over time, but relapses will be frequent.

You will feel as if you have stepped 20 odd years back in time; yes, it has to be this hard to make even the simplest CRUD application.

You will have to pass some fairly elevated hurdles; yes, you have to learn (or at least have some knowledge of) Java, JSF, Expression Language, Groovy, CSS, HTML, Javascript and last but absolutely not least ADF itself.

Start in the Right End
You (or more likely your superior) bought the sales pitch, and thought you arrived to a mature, complete development framework specifically suited to leverage your existing Oracle investments. What you got was the biggest jigsaw puzzle ever, and all the corners missing. To even attempt fiddling around with the pieces, you have to have some basic skills.

ADF is a Java framework (although Java developers would call it xml-based). Java is core. You have to learn the stuff. You will not get far without Java. It is that simple. After all, the kids all learn it at school these days, how hard can it be? The answer is like always; 10% talent, 90% practice, it will take time to be good at it.

As a starting point, I recommend Head First Java. Not only is it educational, it will also help you to realize just how bad all other introductory programming books actually are.

The Next Step
As Java frameworks go, ADF is pretty big. Full JEE stack with lots of bells and whistles, and an abundance of XML-files. The good news is that you can achieve some pretty sophisticated behavior by declaration, the bad news is that you have to know where to turn the knobs. There are a lot of knobs.

First you have to learn the grand picture of the framework;

• The model, aka the meat, or business components
• The other model. Err? This is the binding layer, or view backend model or some such
• The controller thingy with task flows
• The view, as in GUI, and not to be confused with the view object in the first model. Argh...

Grant Ronald will help you on the way with his book Quick Start Guide to Oracle Fusion Development: Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF. Do not let the lengthy title put you off, Mr. Ronald understands where you are coming from, and will gently nudge you in the right direction.

Ready Yet?
Well, that depends. Do you want to create tutorial applications, or the real thing? You should not balk at tutorials, that is not what I am saying. It is just that real business users have never had any clue how to best work with <insert technology/framework here>, they just have needs (of which, you are of course grateful, as it gives you work).

Users do not want to have plain CRUD anymore, they want to have an extremely functional and visually appealing working environment delivered at lightning speed. Business users will push you to the edge, they are both educated within their domain, and most likely used to some seriously fast client server applications.

Nervous?

Relax...
Stay sane just a bit longer. Take a deep breath, there will eventually be a light at the end of the tunnel. Let us hope it is not an oncoming train ;-)

Shay Shmeltzer has a more elaborate (and infinitely better) approach on how to get started with ADF in this blog post.

To be continued...