Foreword

Oracle has a long and successful history of building enterprise application development tools, including some that have outlived their competition. As a former Oracle Forms Product Manager and current Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) Product Manager, this part of the Oracle history has been mine for the last 15 years, and I'm very grateful that there's currently no end in sight!

Building enterprise applications based on Java EE standards is a well-accepted and understood concept for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and service-oriented user interfaces. While Java language skills are standard knowledge for college graduates, broader topics, such as service-enablement, persistence, application security, customization, portalization, and so on are not always so well understood. Adding to this, the "framework-of-the-day" problem—in which framework solutions quickly wax and wane in popularity—makes it difficult for enterprises to adopt software. What most enterprise businesses require is the benefit of standards, but with an end-to-end framework that provides a stable and consistent interface, which can abstract away future technology shifts.

Proven by Oracle Fusion Applications and customer success, Oracle ADF fulfills that need: a rapid application development environment that reduces the skills required for building modern rich enterprise applications to a single learning curve.

Technically, Oracle ADF is an end-to-end Java EE framework for building rich enterprise web and mobile applications based on Java EE services and SOA. Oracle ADF integrates existing Java frameworks into a single architecture and a fully integrated declarative development environment that shields developers from low-level API programming.

Besides being used by Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle customers, Oracle ADF is at the heart of Oracle Middleware and is the technology of choice for building Fusion Middleware (FMW) products, such as Enterprise Manager, WebCenter, UCM, BPM, BI, and so on, showing Oracle's commitment to ADF.

Technology alone, however, is no guarantee for success. Community acceptance and contribution is also an important backbone and measurement of software frameworks and products, including Oracle ADF.

Oracle ADF is supported by a very active and growing community of bloggers, forum posters, and speakers, as well as book and article authors. The Oracle JDeveloper 11gR2 Cookbook you hold in your hands is another example of the ongoing contribution from the ADF community by author Nick Haralabidis.

The book is a practical guide to learning Oracle ADF, providing code solutions, and technical explanations to common Oracle ADF questions and developer challenges. Being one of the technical reviewers for this book and having written other titles as an author myself, I appreciate the time, effort, and dedication Nick Haralabidis has put into writing this book, as well as the Oracle ADF expertise and practices he shares with you, the reader. This book is not a beginner's guide, but a useful reference for all developers starting enterprise application development with Oracle ADF.

Frank Nimphius

Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Application Development Tools