JSF / ADF Faces For Dummies

This is the #1 post of this blog. I’m gonna spend a little time explaining what you will see in this blog in the future.

1. What is this site all about?

Generally, this purpose of this site is to teach people how to use Oracle ADF Faces framework to create J2EE application.

2. Why Oracle ADF Faces?

First of all, it’s a Oracle product and I’m working for Oracle. ‘

Secondly, I do believe a JSF implementation like ADF Faces together with Oracle JDeveloper will move J2EE web app developers a step closer to the Rapid Application Developer (RAD) goal. It will definitly boost the productivity if you know it well.

3. Why without Databinding?

If you know Oracle’s ADF product, you will understand that besides ADF Faces, there is another major ingredient in the ADF framework - the ADF Data Binding mechanism. The existance of ADF Data Binding is to enable utimate drag&drop style development when building a data driven application. It will release you from the burden of manually plumbing the UI component with the underlying business service layer and handles the UI events for you automatically.

But the ADF Data Binding is a sword with two sides. It does save you time from writing some event-handling code. On the other hand, it is not like a breeze to learn how to use Data Biniding. What makes the situation more complicated is that the ADF Faces (or the JSF) is also not as easy as some of the old popular frameworks like Struts. You can imagine, what happens when you have to mix the two at the same time, not to mention you have to know the ADF Business Component or EJB which serves as the Business Service Layer as required by the Data Binding.

So this site is determined to devote to the pure ADF Faces (JSF) way of programming.