One of the sessions I attended yesterday at OOW was by Juan Camilo Ruiz, Product Manager for Oracle Development Tools. His talk was titled ‘Introduction to Oracle ADF Desktop Integration; An Office front-end for ADF Applications.’

He showed how we will be able to use Excel as the client for ADF applications. Instead of having users go into a Swing Desktop client or the ADF Faces Web interface, they can use the tool they are perhaps most familiar with to review, analyze and manipulate the data. Excel is a client to the ADF Model and Business Services through which it downloads the data and uploads the data when the user submits the changes.

Note that the Excel worksheet can taken off-line and the user can work on the data – potentially huge sets of it – in disconnected mode (on the air plane for example where despite all the cloud computing initiatives connectivity still is a scare commodity) only to have it synchronized when it becomes connected again. It is a bit like mobile devices that can work in disconnected mode and synchronize once a connection is available again – but it is Excel behaving in that way. From a developer’s point of view, developing the Excel client for ADF More >