Some Oracle bloggers have been writing and hinting about what oracle is doing with AJAX and JSF. Especially Jonas Jacobi has provided some interesting information about current developments at Oracle.
Oracle’s JSF implementation is called ADF Faces. Introduction to JSF components and the ADF Faces Components is a small introduction to Oracle ADF Faces:
…Oracle ADF includes well over 100 JSF components (ADF Faces) that provide end users with a very rich and powerful experience. There are components like color pickers, list of values and calendars…
All these components currently use HTML and WML as the markup languages…
Oracle is in the midst of revamping the renderers of these components by adding a combination of DHTML and JavaScript support, which will provide an even richer user experience, including partial page rendering. This new render kit, called the rich client, is so powerful that it almost deprecates the use of Swing.
This last statement comes with a screenshot showing a rich user interface in a webbrowser, titled: ADF.Faces.NEXT.
DHTML, Javascript, partial page rendering, this all sound a lot like what most people today call AJAX. A big post about the basics of AJAX can be found on Tug’s blog: Web UI: What’s behind AJAX? Simple use cases using XMLHttpRequest
Jonas Jacobi writes why JSF would be the right technology to support AJAX in his post: Quote – “JSF is not a rich client technology”:
One of the key differentiators of JavaServer Faces (JSF) is its ability to be markup agnostic, allowing you to attach any available presentation technology (HTML, DHTML, Telnet/Character mode and eventually SVG, Flash, XUL, etc.) to a set of reusable components.
And this is what Oracle has been doing as can be read in his post Wireless development with JSF
ADF Faces EA16 supports XHTML … We are working on an additional richer render kit support what has lately been known as Ajax (XHTML, XmlHttpRequest, JavaScript, and DOM.
And it looks like some screenshots have been posted recently which display these AJAX components in action. Justin Kestelyn posted some impressive looking Oracle BAM screenshots: New Oracle BAM Screenshots. His post doesn’t mention the technology used in these screenshots, but you can see the application is running in internet explorer. However, it could technically still be webforms or something similar. But we see a lot of graphs, which could be the BI components Jonas Jacobi is writing about in Wireless development with JSF:
leveraging JSF as the base … our Business Intelligence team is working on a set of ADF Faces BI components
Grant Ronald is also blogging about web applications with a rich gui: So can you have a productive end user with a pure web application? Included are some interesting screenshots: 1 (no longer available), 2, 3, 4 & 5 . Grant doesn’t tell us if this application is built using JSF, but if you hover over the pictures you see a hint with the following text: “Faces UI”.
So it looks like we’ll soon see JSF components with support for AJAX technology. When can we expect this? Again, Jonas Jacobi gives us a hint in JSF renderers for mobile devices, xhtml:
When we go production with JDeveloper 10.1.3 we will have Telnet, PDA’s, and ASK (IM, SMS, MMS, SMTP, Paging, etc..,) support, and also integration with peripheral devices such as scanners, portal printers
And in Quote – “JSF is not a rich client technology” he writes about ADF.Faces.NEXT:
We are still not there to be able to provide you with an early access release of these components until earliest August 2005. Work that is currently on going is to get the underlying framework together so that the components can support e.g. drag and drop
I guess it’s save to say that JDeveloper 10.1.3 will include ADF Faces, but no support for AJAX. But as the screenshots show, AJAX support is progressing quite nicely.
I think Oracle is building a real alternative for Oracle Forms, a technology which will allow you to build rich gui data entry applications (and ofcourse a lot of other types of applications as well), but this time it’s build on open standards. And you’ll also be able to use your applications on pda’s (or smart phones)and through telnet.
November 3rd, 2005 at 22:03:53
Ajax bathroom cleaner and more
Yes, there is that and there is also “Asynchronous JavaScript and XML”.
Jesse James Garrett, the person who invented the acronym AJAX, defines it:
Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in it…
November 3rd, 2005 at 22:06:31
[...] 1;, read related post by Steve Muench. There is also ADF Faces, [...]
March 24th, 2006 at 11:16:31
You mention BAM and pose what technology is involved. We were told by an Oracle technology person here in Melbourne that it is actually written in .net and was part of the peoplesoft aquisition. They are working on moving it to another (java I suppose) technology.
Cheers
Ben
March 24th, 2006 at 11:56:56
Looks like you’re right. I did a search on google for oracle+bam+.net and i found a oracle forums post about somebody installing bam, which required the .net framework.
The bam screenshots look similar to the faces screenshots posted by grant ronald. This is, they both have a lot of graphs. But if you look closer there are differences. Seems like you create pretty impressive applications with both technologies.
April 17th, 2006 at 23:19:27
Hey check out the following:
http://developer.ebusiness-apps.com:8888/EbaJsfComboBox/
April 17th, 2006 at 23:25:34
Nice, just a simple tag to implement dependent selectboxes. See http://www.it-eye.nl/weblog/2006/04/04/implementing-dependent-select-boxes-in-jsf/ for the adf faces implementation.
April 19th, 2006 at 12:02:07
[...] to JSF and AJAX Interesting article reads http://www.jsftutorials.net/ JSF + AJAX = ADF.Faces.NEXT Usin [...]
June 9th, 2006 at 13:22:39
hi,
i’m very much interested to implement adf Faces and AJAX in my ongoing project. but the the prob i faced there is problem to map ADF Faces into MVC (More Specific Front Controler) architechture using J2ee.
and another question can i use EJB if i use ADF Faces and Ajax.
pls give me a suitable suggession.
June 9th, 2006 at 13:29:19
Jdevelope is most productive if you use the default ADF Faces/JSF controller, ie. use faces-config.xml to define navigation rules. Why do you want to use a different MVC framework?
You can use EJBs with ADF Faces. The current version of JDeveloper (10.1.3) has support for EJB 2.1 and a draft version of EJB3. The next release (10.1.3..1) will have support for EJB3 final.
If you can, i would use EJB3. It’s much better than 2.1.
June 12th, 2006 at 12:53:22
Hi guys ,
i’ve attended some Oracle ADF workshop and the it was great , I raised the AJAX quesiotn with JDeveloper and the Oracle guys replied with a nice “Oracle ADF -Ajax” Demo but they said the demo is for inernal team only and will be available in June 2006. we are almost in mid of June , no news? Is Oracle JDevelop coming with open standard for AJAX components? or will be Oracle specific AJAX development framework?
I need a concrete answer please , we are taking decisions.
Thanks
Rami AL-SAHHAR
June 12th, 2006 at 14:06:53
ADF Faces components are standard JSF components which means you can use them with other JSF components. But this doesn’t mean you can have ADF Faces components which will automatically update when a non ADF Faces JSF component changes.
I think Oracle will release an AJAX enabled ADF Faces version. The current ADF Faces components are already AJAX enabled, but the next version will probably have more extensive AJAX support.
There currently is no AJAX standard. The dojo framework is being used quite a lot, but it’s not a standard. There are some other good AJAX frameworks. There is also no standard AJAX architecture yet. Some frameworks are serverless frameworks (Google Web Toolkit for example), other frameworks do most of the work on the server.
I think it’s too early to take AJAX decisions, people are still experimenting. Just pick a framework and see if it works for you.
June 12th, 2006 at 14:51:38
Thanks Koelewijn for your quick reply,
My question mainly was about Oracle JDeveloper and its AJAX road map,I can see JDev. still cooking AJAX to be released later on, I hope it can come up with it very soon.
Regards
Rami
September 29th, 2006 at 12:39:32
Any news from ADF Faces .Next ? Is it still under developpement, soon released or just a vaporware ?
I expect a lot from this new framework to get rid of my old Forms 6i applications !
October 4th, 2006 at 09:27:44
No official news, as far as i know. But Oracle OpenWorld starts in two weeks, I expect more info then.
October 17th, 2006 at 14:15:30
[...] ation, ADF Faces, will have AJAX and Rich Client support (I blogged about this last year: JSF + AJAX = ADF.Faces.NEXT). The current release of ADF Faces doesn’t really do [...]
March 28th, 2007 at 10:52:18
my question is using ADF faces with EJB (generally JSF with EJB we are facing the home interfance calling number of times. is it rectified in ADF faces
March 28th, 2007 at 13:27:41
I don’t think i understand your question. Are you saying that adf faces calls ejbs different than normal JSF pages?
August 10th, 2007 at 15:22:28
[...] The ADF.Faces.NEXT posting on this blog gets a lot of traffic, many people ask for more info. Shay Shmeltzer just posted an entry on his weblog which will be of interest to them: ADF Faces Rich Client Demo and Other AJAX Thingies. He links to a viewlet which demos Oracle’s upcoming AJAX enabled JSF components used for a webstore: ADF Faces Rich Client – Sneak Preview. Btw, Oracle internally refers to these components as the “Rich Client Components”, not ADF.Faces.NEXT. Sphere: Related Content [...]