Avrom’s Java EE and Oracle ADF Blog

Most ADF BC users are traditional Oracle developers–Forms or PL/SQL developers–who are relatively new to Java and Java EE (some, at this point, have lots of Java expertise, but even those usually have still more experience with an older Oracle technology). Because of this, when they miss out on one of the greatest powers of Java, reusability, they often don’t realize, or at least appreciate, what they’re missing out on. So the fact that ADF BC doesn’t openly encourage designing custom code for reusability gets missed.

But this is emphatically not to say that ADF BC doesn’t enable reusability, or even that it’s not documented. It’s just not called out in ways that would encourage a novice, or even intermediate, ADF BC developer to take advantage of it. Continue Reading »

What is a backing bean? Getting a consistent answer can be harder than you might think. For example, the NetBeans JSF tutorial claims that the two terms are synonyms. And NetBeans had its origin at Sun, so they ought to know, right? On the other hand, the official Java EE 5 Tutorial says that a backing bean “is a JavaServer Faces managed bean that is associated with the UI components used in a particular page.” That suggests that backing beans are a proper subclass of managed beans. And that’s straight from the horse’s mouth, at java.sun.com.

I think that the distinction made by the Java EE tutorial–that a backing bean is a particular sort of managed bean distinguished by its association with a particular page’s components–is a very useful one. But the tutorial also states that “A typical JavaServer Faces application couples a backing bean with each page in the application.” And that is where we part company.

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Over the last two weeks, I’ve been talking about model layer code to facilitate integration of database-level validation logic into an ADF application. This week, let’s finish off the project by writing the controller-layer code that will turn these custom exceptions into nice, user-friendly error messages. Continue Reading »