Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) is what makes the upcoming JDeveloper 9.0.5 exciting. ADF enables you to easily combine all the good technologies that exist right now (JSP, UIX, BC4J, Toplink, EJB, Struts). Amazingly it will not force you to use oracle technologies, but it will allow you to configure what you want to use. For example, you can use Struts as the controller, or you can use Oracle ADF controller. For the view layer you can choose JSP’s, UIX, or even Swing. All this uses the ADF binding and ADF Data Control API’s, which oracle wants to standardize (See JSR 227).
And it looks like JDeveloper will make this all really easy, just some dragging and dropping and changing properties. It’s almost like using Oracle Forms. Makes you wonder though, who ever wanted to change the technologies used inside Forms? I can see how you may want to specify what kind of interface to generate (html or gui), but do you really care if underneath it uses bc4j or toplink? As longs as it works.
All in all it looks like Oracle is delivering with JDeveloper what Sun has promissed with Rave. Let’s see how well Sun delivers. And jdeveloper seems to become as productive as visual studio. Good marketing Oracle, now let me try it!
(More on this subject here)