OAF v ADF: Finally its official

I always had tough time convincing my management and sales folks (who in turn must convince customers) to prefer OAF over much hyped ADF for custom extension of Ebusiness Suite. Well, to be honest there was one part of me, a teeny tiny part, that was skeptical and sometime cynically pointing out the conservative nature of me sticking to the technology I know rather than learning or adopting the new. Oracle finally managed to release a white paper on it. (Got it from Steve Chan's blog) You can download it from metalink.

I am happy that Oracle finally felt it important to release something of this sort. Some of the key highlights
- OAF and ADF are not entirely different. Both uses some common components like BC4J, UIX etc
- If you are planning to integrate with Ebusiness suite, stick with OAF.
- If your application is entirely new and independent of ebusiness suite then use ADF.

Some of my observations

1. The disclaimer, quoted below, kinda scared me initially, but I guess its just some legal stuff.

"The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended
for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is
not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not
be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and
timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at
the sole discretion of Oracle."


2. You have to believe things said in the article since it is from Oracle. But still I was curious about author of this white paper. Sarah Woodhull, not heard that name before but googled it found that she is Senior Product Analyst with ATG group. The co-author, Padmaprabodh Ambale, is famous in OAF circles and I have interacted with him many times during my stint in Oracle development and he took one of the OAF training class. (Ironically in that class like three years ago he kinda mentioned that OAF is gonna go away soon)

3. Oracle evades one key question. Can we easily migrate the custom extensions to fusion middle ware? White paper says that it is "possible" to migrate the UI (OK thats convincing) and Controller migration is non-trivial (How???) and easy migration for BC4J (phuh I guessed it).

4. Well guys it is final ..but not final yet. Wait until ADF11g is out. Oracle might change their mind.

"When ADF 11g becomes production, we will publish a revised paper that compares OAF with
ADF 11g, and discuss development against E-Business Suite."


5. OAF AND ADF – A DETAILED COMPARISON Table looks cool and totally favors OAF based on number of "X" marks against ADF. But I think the paper left out of lotsa cool things of ADF which would have cause lot many "X" against OAF. So it seems the table was made after making the decision or should I say recommendation.


6. It has "X" for PLSQL DML Operation Support for ADF. I dont know that much ADF, but thats scary ....


Overall I am sure that lotsa customers are gonna get huge benefits out of this white paper ....