Book Review: Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook by Amr Gawish

During my short vacation I spend some time reading books. One of them was ‘Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook’ by Amr Gawish (http://bit.ly/PhWTlR).

Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook

The book is written as a cookbook, as the name says, for ADF Faces in the version 12c (12.1.2.0.0 to be accurate). The book offers 10 chapters:

1. Building Your ADF Faces Environment From the Ground Up

Here you get information about how to install JDK 1.7, Oracle XE Database, JDeveloper and how to tune the environment to work best together. Finally you can download the code used throughout the book from a GIT repository.Make sure to download the code and have it ready while reading the book!

2. Getting Started with ADF Faces and JDeveloper

In this chapter you get the very basics about development of Fusion Web Applications, building an workspace, connection to the DB, creating a business service, defining page flows and pages and how to run an ADF Faces application from within JDev.

3. Presenting Data Using ADF Faces

Here we start with use cases used for presenting data. You get info on how to present single records and different master – detail use cases, using different techniques. Finally a first glance on internationalization.

4. Using Common ADF Faces Components

Here you get a walk through to the normal adf faces components for input, output, selection, loading of data as well as pop-up, code editor, menu model, links, trains and dynamic components.

5. Beautifying the Application Layout for Great User Experience

Is about page templates, skins, responsive design and flat design techniques.

6. Enriching User Experience with Visualization Components

This chapter handles maps, graphs, gauges, Gantt charts, hierarchy, sunburst and timeline components.

7. Handling Events and Partial Page Rendering

Here events (client and server), partial triggers and behavior components are introduced. Polling, Drag & Drop, Active Data Service and WebSocket are described too in this chapter.

8. Validating and Converting Inputs

Is about conversation of data, custom converters, validation (client and server) and faces messaging.

9. Building Your Application for Reuse

Picking up from chapter 2 we learn about page templates, exception handling task flow parameters, contextual events, ADFLibraries and finally Meta Data Service (MDS).

10. Scaling your ADF Faces Application

The final chapter is about performance and recommendations as well as some advances options like Content Delivery Network (CDN) and ADF caching of resources.

The cookbook uses its own db schema which looks kind of familiar, as it’s build from the well known HR schema.

While reading the book I found some recipes hard to understand for novice developers, without reading the provided code in parallel. This is because the book is all about ADF Faces but spares most about the ADF Business Components Model layer. Here the reader has to know how things are working and how to set things up.
For experienced developers some of the covered topics are nothing new, we work with them every day. The uses cases covered are mostly basic in nature and you often see links to the original documentation. Here you find the missing information which is not covered in the cookbook itself. I would have liked some more deep going information on how properties work together for some often used components like af:table or af:panelGridLayout.

I personally found it hard to understand why the author used task flows build from pages for some of the use cases just because ‘it’s easier’. One of the main advantages are task flows build of fragments. They allow reuse and help divide a task into smaller pieces. Tools like the ADF-EMG Task Flow Tester are not even mentioned. Using this tool makes it easy to run task-flows build on fragments without the need to build a JSF Page to host the region.
There are no use cases which handle region specific questions like when regions are refreshed or how regions are restarted. Transaction management and data control sharing are not covers too.

The real interesting part of the book starts with chapter 5, where page templates, skins and at least some layout techniques are introduced. Very interesting is the use case about using SAAS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) and Compass to build more dynamic css files which can be used in ADF. The chapter covers Responsive Web Design and Flat Design Techniques (which are trying to minimize the design) too.

Also interesting are the samples which are build in chapter 6 for graphs, gauges, maps, pivot table, Gantt charts (calendar is missing), timeline and sunburst. However I personally find them hard to digest as they have many ingredients (steps in this case) which you have to follow. Again the model layer is pre-build for you, which means you have to find out yourself how and if there are something special in the model to cook the dish. Nevertheless, samples in this area are hard to find, and these samples do work!

The chapter about event handling and ppr is a very nice summary of how things work in ADF. Easy to understand samples are making it easy to follow the concepts. Here you find samples for ADS (Active Data Service) and WebSocket too. Nice!
Contextual events are handled in a later chapter (‘Building Your Application for Reuse’) but they are not described in great detail. It’s enough to get a first impression.

The final chapter is a nice summary of performance increasing methods and techniques which is worth reading. After reading the techniques it make sense to test them on your system!

Summary:
Novice developers learn basic ADF Faces techniques and components by building samples. Some recipes are too complicated to understand by just reading them. As the book uses its own DB schema you should have this ready, as well as the code, to work through them.