Application Implementation Considerations and Options
With the database design done, engineered to a relational design and some physical implementation scripts generated, my attention turned to the front end implementation of INFRA.Requirements
INFRA is intended to be available as an application that anyone can install on just about any relational database and just about any application infrastructure. And I don’t want cost to be a major factor for anyone who wants to use it, so I want to look at free to use frameworks and tools. I say “free to use” because I have expertise in Oracle tools and frameworks, and while these are not open source, there are several options that are free to use. Still, many potential users of INFRA will prefer not to be locked into the tools of a single vendor (and I’m afraid they are strongly biased AGAINST Oracle), and thus will prefer open source.As for requirements, I’d prefer to stick with standards and especially do as much with plain HTML and CSS as possible. I also want good tooling, and am very fond of having the tools do as much of the work as possible. So I want a good IDE with good support for the chosen framework. I have nothing against a good text editor to write short programs where I am hand writing most of the code. For an entire project, however, nothing beats a good IDE, and I have experience with three, NetBeans, Eclipse and Oracle JDeveloper. So here is a little about the choices I considered:
Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF)
ADF has been my professional choice since 2010, and I am still the Lead Moderator for the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group (ADF EMG). So despite the bias against anything from Oracle, I needed to consider ADF, because I can hit the ground running with it. ADF is certainly not open source, which is a mark against it, but there is a subset of ADF called ADF Essentials that is free to use. Unfortunately, the full ADF product only runs on Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS), but ADF Essentials is supported on Glassfish, and is known to work on several other JEE standards compliant application servers, like JBoss and with careful configuration on Apache Tomcat. ADF is a Model/View/Controller (MVC) based framework. It supports the JPA standard for Object Relational Mapping (ORM) for its Model and Java Server Faces (JSF) for its View. The ADF Faces JSF component library has lots of widgets that give you lots of options for layout, data presentation, and input/update forms.My favorite part of ADF is tooling. You can develop ADF Essentials applications in Oracle JDeveloper, but you do have to be careful to stay away from parts of ADF that require the full tool – i.e. must be deployed on WLS. But JDeveloper has wonderful WYSIWYG support for ADF Faces (and Apache Trinidad) components and can do things like let you drag fields from your ORM onto a page and generate a table component configured to display them, or a form to insert, update or delete data in the database. There have been complaints that JDeveloper is slow and buggy however, and it isn’t in very wide use outside the Oracle user community. As an alternative, you can develop ADF Essentials applications with Eclipse by installing the Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE). OEPE doesn’t show ADF Faces components quite as well as JDeveloper, and doesn’t have as much code generation, but it is not bad, and probably a little more stable.
The problems with ADF are: It isn’t open source. Oracle’s support for ADF has been waning, and that means that updates of ADF and of JDeveloper have been very widely spaced. Later versions of JDeveloper have bugs that have not been adequately addressed. It has never gained a large following in the developer community. But to me, the killer that sent me looking for an alternative is that ADF Essentials does not support ADF Security for authorization and authentication of your application. In earlier versions of ADF, this was okay because you COULD configure standard JEE security instead, or use a third party security framework like Spring Security or Apache Shiro. But the latest versions of ADF Essentials broke this, and while I’ve developed a work around, I’m not happy with it.
Other JSF Libraries
Java Server Faces is a JEE standard for the View and Controller, and so is JPA for the Model. Through ADF, I was already familiar with how these work, so a different set of JSF components seemed like a good option. There are a number of libraries around, many of which are open source.Apache Trinidad
One faces library that appealed to me is Apache Trinidad, which originated as Oracle’s earlier 10g version of ADF Faces (current version is 12c 2.3), so I had actually used this in my first few ADF projects. Oracle opened the source to this library and contributed it to the Apache MyFaces project. This is under active development. One nice thing about Trinidad is that both JDeveloper and Eclipse with OEPE have tooling support for it, so you can get some of the drag and drop and code generation features of these tools without tying yourself to Oracle’s proprietary ADF Faces. Or you can add JSF and the Trinidad library to an Eclipse project without using OEPE.Unfortunately, Trinidad is also not terribly popular among non-Oracle developers. It has been enhanced to keep up with the latest JSF standard, but not much for functionality.
