I just finished giving an Oracle ADF training. This is a 3 day training were people learn to use EJB3, JPA, JSF, ADF Faces and ADF Data Controls and Data Bindings. This is a lot of material for 3 days, next time we’ll probably extend the training to 4 or 5 days.

As always, the students aren’t the only ones who learn a lot during a training. I always find that whenever I’m giving a training I’m learning a lot too. To be able to explain how something works, and how you should use it, means you have to really understand it. Just being able to use it, doesn’t mean you understand it well enough to explain it.

I created the training material myself, which was also quite a challenging task. There’s so much information available about the subjects, what do you put in your slides and what do you skip? In the beginning i just put everything i thought relevant on the slides, but this is not a good way to learn about ADF.

So i turned it around, it’s not the slides nor the information that is important. What is important is that the students learn how to use the tools to create the applications that they need. This means that the core of the training should be the exercises. If a student can complete an exercises it means he’s able to use the technology. So i created a lot of exercises, and only put in my slides whatever i though necessary for the students to be able to complete the exercises (to be honest, i still have some slides in there that aren’t really necessary for the exercises, these will be removed the next time i give the training).

It’s also important that the exercises slowly become more complex, it’s a step by step process. I read an interesting statement some time ago on a forum which said that you can only learn what you almost know. I think this is very true, and it means that a training needs a lot of exercises that slowly expect more knowledge of the subject.

Another interesting fact i learned during the training is that ADF Business Components and JHeadstart are quite popular. Personally, I prefer to use standard solutions whenever a good standard solution is available. For example, Java Persistency API. Before JPA, java didn’t have a good standard and broadly supported solution for ORM, so better alternatives became mainstream. But in my opinion JPA is good enough for most applications, so for me JPA is the default pick, unless there’s a good reason to use something else. Using standards has the advantage that there’s a lot of information available, and it’s easy to find developers, which is quite important in today’s market. For nonstandard niche solutions it’s a lot harder to find support and developers.

But most of the students in the training had a Oracle Forms Developer and Designer background, and they really like ADF Business Components and JHeadstart. Business Components because it allows them to reuse their extensive SQL knowledge, and JHeadstart because it’s the only tool that gives them the generation productivity similar to Oracle Designer.