How flexible is Oracle ADF?

Question

Given the fact that I have to build an application, or a series of applications using Oracle ADF, how much flexibility do I have?

• Can I run my application on another application server, like IBM WebSphere, or on a simple Servlet container, like Tomcat?
• Can I use Hibernate instead of EclipseLink?
• Can I easily access another database, like Microsoft SQL Server?
• Would Domain-Driven Design fit in the picture?
• How much of an ADF application can be configured using a DI container like Spring?
• What would I miss when I use my favorite IDE, say Eclipse, instead of JDeveloper?
• Can I use Maven for ADF projects?

In other words, what are the limits of freedom within ADF-land? Note that it still has to be an ADF application, not just a Java EE application that uses ADF Faces.

Answer 1

Can I run my application on another application server, like IBM WebSphere, or on a simple Servlet container, like Tomcat?

At the end of the day, the Oracle ADF framework is just some JAR files that you can install on Third-Party Application Servers (with more or less support, depending on the tooling).

Can I use Hibernate instead of EclipseLink?

You can feed ADF with POJOs like annotated JPA entities and you could use Hibernate.

Can I easily access another database, like Microsoft SQL Server?

Yes, provide the appropriate JDBC driver.

Would Domain-Driven Design fit in the picture?

I think it's orthogonal.

How much of an ADF application can be configured using a DI container like Spring?

You can use Spring for the services and data access layer. See:

• Spring and Oracle ADF – registering a POJO Spring JDBC based Business Service as Data Control
• Oracle ADF on the Spring forums

What would I miss when I use my favorite IDE, say Eclipse, instead of JDeveloper?

All the drag & drop stuff.

Can I use Maven for ADF projects?

It's technically doable.

In other words, what are the limits of freedom within ADF-land?

I'll let experts answer that with more details.

Note that it still has to be an ADF application, not just a Java EE application that uses ADF Faces.

Didn't get that one.

Answer 2

ADF is free if you use Weblogic, otherwise you need to buy a runtime license for third-party servers. I dun hv experience in running adf in other servers but it seems technically you could do that according to the above.

I guess it's recommended to use Business Component instead of other ORM framework, BC has a lot of drag-and-drop and binding features. However, ADF is compatible with Spring, EJB, Hibernate.

Though sometimes it's painful to use JDeveloper, It's not a good idea to use other IDE for ADF. The BC feature is tied to the IDE, declarative component feature might be the same. The task flow definition may not be visually editable in Eclipse.

Not an ADF expert (so I used a lot "may","guess"), this is what I know.

Answer 3

I am responding to how to use Maven for an ADF application. I worked for Oracle ADF Faces group and our development department used Subversion and Maven2. We wrote a Maven Plugin that was used at the end to create a .jws file in the parent dir and a .jpr file in a project dir below. That worked quite well and I am pretty sure you can find a Maven 2 plugin to do exactly this in Apache Open source, if I remember correctly. Also, JDeveloper has an option to create an Application from an EAR/WAR file. So, have Maven create a WAR file for example, then use the war file for your application in JDeveloper. Both of these work well.