News from OOW 2008: JDeveloper 11g and ADF 11g go production - TopLink 11g available today javacode 9085791

News from OOW 2008: JDeveloper 11g and ADF 11g go production – TopLink 11g available today

It has been a while. But now we are finally about to witness the production release of JDeveloper 11g and ADF 11g including the ADF RichFaces components. Today, Oracle announced that JDeveloper 11g will be available for download from OTN from October 1st, in a little over a week. At that time, ADF 11g application can be deployed on production systems and will be supported. Note that ADF 11g at this point is certified against WebLogic 10.3 and currently does not support OC4J. JDeveloper 11g ships with WebLogic 10.3 as its integrated web server; the embedded OC4J container is no longer there.

The JDeveloper 11g release we will get access to on October 1st is duped ‘the Boxer release’. Sometime in the first half of 2009 we will get the successor, called ‘Bulldog’. The Boxer release does not contain the SOA Suite design time – as the SOA Suite runtime will not be available until some time next year – nor will it contain WebCenter. There have been suggestions that it does not contain the MDS and Active Data Source features either, nor the Hierarchy Viewer..

Currently the ADF Runtime license is free for organization deploying on WebLogic (and OC4J 11g when it becomes available). For other application servers, the license is about $120/user, $5800 /processor. The ADF runtime license now does not just include ADF 11g Runtime but TopLink 11g and MapViewer (needed for the geomap DVT component).

The Bulldog Release – the road ahead

First of all: JDeveloper 11g was originally slated to synchronize with all of Fusion Middleware 11g. However, partly due to the BEA acquisition, the release plan for FMW 11g has been revised. The current word on when FMW 11g will be released is first half 2009. Since the Bulldog release for JDeveloper is mainly about synchronizing with FMW 11g, its release date will coincide with that of FMW 11g.

Bulldog will first of all provide the design time for all of FMW 11g, including WebCenter and SOA Suite.

Other areas that we will see new or improved functionality in:

  • Application Life Cycle Management – support for collaboration in development projects including Interfaces to Bug Tracking, Project Managementt tools (MS project), Requirement Management and interface to Integration Server (Oracle Team Server) [a new term for me]. (I was wondering whether this also includes a link with Oracle Application Test Suite?)
  • Mobile: inlcuding disconnected clients (not based on Google Gears); Oracle acquired the assets of AppForge some time ago, a company that did a lot on data synchronization for disconnected clients that upon reconnection needs to be realigned with the server; their product – Replay Server – is likely to play a central part in this
  • ADFdi – desktop integration (licensed as part of ADF, no additional cost for Oracle AS/WebLogic customers); using Excel as another ADF User Interface, including off line functionality
  • ESS Base (Hyperion) Data Control

 

Open Source – Trinidad and ADF

Oracle had previously announced that ADF Rich Faces would be donated into the Trinidad Open Source project. That is going to happen in the very near future. In addition, there are very serious plans to also donate the ADF Faces Controller to Trinidad. That would mean that Task Flows for example become available to the open source community.

The JSF standards are not very well defined in the area of Controller. There is the Lifecycle obviously and the Navigation mechanism – which is fairly bare bones. There is little support for reusing/nesting fragments in an intelligent way, having these fragments walk through their own navigational logic etc. By donating the ADF Controller to the open source community, Oraxcle hopes to help shape the near future of JSF (the 2.0 release of spec perhaps?) and make sure that the controller side of JSF is strengthened.

Browser Support

ADF Faces is certified against the following browsers:

  • Firefox 2 & 3
  • Internet Exploirer 7 (IE 8 testing right now)
  • Safari 3.0

There is no support for IE 6 – nor will their be. Testing Google Chrome is being conducted at this moment; there are some (minor) issues with the JavaScript V8 engine in Chrome.

In terms of performance, ADF Faces has the best (client side) performance on Safari. Firefox 3.0 is substantially faster than 2.0 – about 25%. Internet Explorer 7 has similar performance as Firefox 2.0. No metrics are available for IE 8 at this stage.

New initiatives

In the very near future, the Oracle ADF team will make a live demo available of the ADF 11g Rich Faces components. The url for this demo application is: rea.oracle.com .

Another initiative is currently duped ‘CodeShare’. It is to be a site where samples, skins, utilities and other useful reusables created by the ADF community can be collected. It coulld be something like a SourceForge project or an area in Google Code. What shape it will take is currently being decided.

Speaking about the ADF Community: over 40 ADF specialists from around the world have joined forces in ADF Community (see The world wide ADF community – convenes in the Oracle Wiki, develops the ADF methodology and meets at Oracle Open World for more details and the urls for the Wiki and the Google Group). The community convenes during OOW at the Unconference process to discuss ADF obviously and brainstorm on how to make the community work in the near future. Oracle will be present – representatives from Product Management and – at least as interesting – developers from Oracle Fusion Applications development who have been working with ADF 11g for the last year or so.

16 Comments

  1. Jean-Marc Desvaux September 27, 2008
  2. Peter Lorenzen September 25, 2008
  3. Lucas Jellema September 25, 2008
  4. florin marcus September 24, 2008
  5. Lucas Jellema September 24, 2008
  6. florin marcus September 24, 2008
  7. Lucas Jellema September 24, 2008
  8. Lucas Jellema September 24, 2008
  9. florin marcus September 24, 2008
  10. Peter Lorenzen September 23, 2008
  11. Lucas Jellema September 23, 2008
  12. Andrej September 23, 2008
  13. Lucas Jellema September 23, 2008
  14. Jan September 22, 2008
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  16. Edwin Biemond September 22, 2008