Avrom’s Java EE and Oracle ADF Blog

This is the second part of a two-part series about undocumented tricks with shared application module instances. Last week, I talked about calling methods (at the application module, view object, or view row level) from shared application module instances. This week, I’m going to talk about displaying data (in a non-LOV context) out of them. If you want a general overview of what shared application module instances are and why I think using them is a good idea (particularly at the application scope), look here.

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Last week, I talked a bit about the advantages of using shared application module instances, particularly those scoped at the application level. As I said there, creating shared application module instances is described in Chapter 10 of the Fusion Developer’s Guide for Oracle ADF, as is their primary use, containing view object instances for lookups, to be used in validation and LOV attributes.

This week and next, I’m going to talk about other things you can do with shared application module instances, things that aren’t as well documented. This week, I’ll talk about calling service methods on shared application module instances, the view object instances in their data model, or particular rows from thise view object instances; next week, I’ll talk about actually displaying data from the shared instance’s data model as components (other than choice/LOV components) on a page. Continue Reading »

Last week, I talked about ways to get many (though not all) of the benefits of service-oriented architecture (SOA) without the overhead of web service invocations by composing your applications out of smaller reusable applications. This week, I’m going to talk about a way to get a different subset of the benifits of SOA (without web services) in ADF 11g, using shared application module instances.

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In my very first post on this blog, I talked about service-oriented architecture (SOA), and how, while I thought it was extremely appropriate for a certain range of cases, the overhead involved in web service invocation made it very inappropriate for an equally wide, if not wider, range of cases.

Today, I want to talk a bit about an ADF 11g alternative to SOA that still gives you many of its benefits without the web service invocation overhead: reusable applications. (Next week, I’ll talk about another SOA-in-spirit mechanism that ADF 11g provides: Shared application module instances.) Continue Reading »

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 »