The Application Development Framework (ADF) is a productivity layer for J2EE developers that will help to simplify the construction of applications as a set of business services using Web, wireless, or rich client interfaces. It was made available in developer preview form this summer, and it was hoped then that it would go into production later this year.
However, the company confirmed that ADF would only be made available with the launch of Oracle JDeveloper 10g, which is slated for early next year.
Despite delays in making them available, both products look set to make a big impression on application developers.
ADF enables developers to adopt an SOA (service oriented architecture) approach, which promises to enable composite applications to be assembled from a set of web services. The advantage of this approach is said to be ease of implementation, and the potential to reuse services within and across different development projects.
With SOA, resources are made available to other participants in the network as independent services that are accessed in a standardized way. This produces a more flexible coupling of resources than tends to be the case with traditional systems architectures, according to Oracle.
ADF is said to accelerate development with ready-to-use J2EE design pattern implementations and metadata-driven components that developers would otherwise have to code, test, and debug by hand.
ADF will support the Oracle 9iAS application server and can also be used as a layer above rival vendors’ application servers
ADF will be licensed as part of JDeveloper 10g and no additional runtime license will be required to deploy applications based on the framework.
The next iteration of the company’s JDeveloper development environment should also be available in the New Year.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
