Saturday, June 23, 2007

Our first ADF application is production-ready!

As you might have noticed, my last post was written over a month ago. The reason is simple: I was quite busy finishing our first ADF application that is now production-ready! :) Whew...

We've learned a lot about ADF and JDeveloper. Hopefully we'll be able to leverage the power of this framework in future applications. Did everything go smoothly? Well, no. We are still not comfortable with ADF Security (we had to remove the authorization support), because it does throw weird exceptions in some situations and the ADF Security wizard in JDeveloper is a problem itself (it's hard to do any teamwork with this wizard).

Another conclusion is that the JPA+EJB3+ADF stack is not as productive as we thought. I'm going to have another look at ADF BC in the near future.

Finally, a few things worth mentioning:
1. If you have a problem with locales (e.g. the default ADF messages show up in a different locale than your messages), you should have a look here.
2. If you are using Oracle XE and Firefox and you cannot edit SQL scripts in the web interface, this message will lead you to a solution.
3. I've enhanced Frank Nimphius's solution (JSF login form for container-managed authentication in Java Server Faces) to make it more useful. I'll publish my modifications as soon as I find some spare time. Stay tuned ;)