ADF productivity seminar

Last week i presented a productivity comparison between Oracle Forms Designer (a RAD tool) and Oracle Jdeveloper ADF at IT-eye’s ADF seminar. The first presentation during this seminar was given by oracle’s Ted Farrell. He gave an overview of ADF, grid computing and SOA. He also demoed ADF. It was very impressive, even current Forms Developer users were excited.

I’ve compared ADF with Forms Developer regarding productivity by creating a master detail form with both tools. The java application uses jclient (swing) & business components. I added some features like drop down boxes, list of value screens , check boxes, lookup fields, etc.

Using forms developer this takes about 30 minutes, and you’ll need to write 80 lines of code. Using JDeveloper it takes about 45 minutes, and you’ll have to write 105 lines of code. (The lines of code will change of course, depending on how you format it, but it gives you an indication of how much work each tool required).

Overall i’d say that for this example jdeveloper is 30% to 50% slower. These numbers will ofcourse be different for different screens, i do not want to suggest that these numbers are valid for all screens.

Although in this example Jdeveloper is less productive, there are very good reasons for using it. Using jdeveloper you create standards based java code, Forms Developer is a proprietary oracle solution. Also Forms Developer is very good for data entry back office applications, but it will get in your way if you try to create something else. Java on the other hand is much more flexible.

I’ve you are creating an appliction that consists of more than rich gui data entry screens, for example web services or html self service pages, Forms Developer is not your tool. The tool that oracle offers for these kinds of technologies is jdeveloper. You can probably share business logic between the different interface technologies. For example business components used by the html interface and the web services can be reused by a swing interface. This reuse could result in a rich gui productivity with jdeveloper which is higher than the productivity achieved using Forms Developer.

(More info: IT-eye ADF seminar)

blog comments powered by Disqus