OraTransplant

Integrate Oracle Forms and JSF/ADF Faces with drag-and-drop

I am happy and proud to announce the public availability of OraFormsFaces, a JSF component library to integrate Oracle Forms and JSF or ADF Faces. This allows you to embed Oracle Forms in a JSF page and truly integrate the two, including passing context, events, eliminating Forms applet startup time, and many more features.

I feel this is the key ingredient that is missing from Oracle’s offerings. Forms is a mature product and Oracle has a great Java stack, but unfortunately you cannot really integrate the two in a single application. This leaves many of the traditional Forms users with a dilemma. They might want to use the Java stack for new developments, but they don’t want to be forced into a rewrite of there Forms application to this Java stack.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you can use the Java stack for new developments but protect your investment in Oracle Forms? With OraFormsFaces, you can. You can build new JSF or ADF Faces based web applications and integrate your existing Forms applications in them. You can pass parameters from JSF to Forms and the other way around. Both Forms and JSF can raise events (commands or triggers) in the other technology. With the possibility of integrating Forms into JSF, you can even go one step further and integrate Oracle Forms in any other web technology, whether it is Oracle Portal, Oracle WebCenter, PHP, ASP.Net, or something else.

I’ve prepared two demo movies showing different ways of integrating Forms and JSF; the first one keeps the powerful multi-document interface of Oracle Forms, whereas the second one makes the Forms look like a true web application and could be used for a smooth migration from Oracle Forms to web technology.

As some of you know, I’ve been working on this concept since 2005. Initially it was a quest for a way to interact programmatically with the Forms applet running in the client web browser. In summer 2007 I presented a solution to the world at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference, and later I published the same solution in an OTN article, an Oracle OpenWorld 2007 presentation, and several other places. The solution is based on a JavaScript API that enables Forms to execute JavaScript in the browser and JavaScript in the client page to interact with the Forms applet. The concept as presented in 2007 was still very technical and required quite some work form both the Forms and the Java programmer.

Since summer 2007 a lot has happened. It took a lot of work and that’s why it’s been much too quiet on this blog. The same basic concept has been wrapped in a JSF component library.Now it’s as simple as dropping a JAR file in your Java project and drag-and-drop a Form, FormParameter, or FormCommand component to your JSF page in a visual editor. See some other screencasts on how easy it is to get this done in JDeveloper. Also, a lot more features have been added since the proof-of-concept in 2007. For instance, making it compatible with Single Sign On basically required a complete rearchitect and rewrite of the solution.

The solution is now available for everyone as the OraFormsFaces library. You can download two running demo applications to look at the end result first. If that got you interested, you can download a trial version of OraFormsFaces and the OraFormsFaces Developer’s Guide to get started for yourself. If you do run into any problems, feel free to ask at the forum or file a bug report in the issue tracker.

Good luck integrating your Oracle Forms application with your latest JSF or ADF Faces applications.

Movie showing JSF component to integrate Oracle Forms

I’m about to release a JSF component library to the public that can integrate Oracle Forms in a JSF/ADF Faces web application. As a sneak preview I’ve already put up the first screencast movie demonstrating how easy it is to embed an Oracle Form in a JSF page.

The component library not only supports the embedding of a Form like shown in the demo. It also allows you to pass parameters to the Form, pass parameters back from Forms to JSF, execute JSF navigation from Forms PL/SQL. On top of all that, it only starts the Forms applet once for your entire web session. So even when a user is switching between pages with and without an embedded Form, the user will not have to wait 5-10 secs for the Forms applet to start.

If you’re interested please check back soon for more information. If you’re visiting Oracle OpenWorld this year, be sure to enroll for my session on Monday. I’ll be talking about the technical details of JSF-Forms integration and will also be showing the JSF component library that was used to create this demo movie.

Demo of AJAX enabled ADF Faces

On my third and final day at ODTUG I attended a session by Frank Nimphius about “Building Rich Internet Applications with AJAX and JSF” I was hoping to see the Ajax enabled ADF Faces components demoed. They wre quickly shown in a keynote earlier this week and looked very promising. At the end Frank did give a demo and I managed to get it on video!

He started the session by explaining what Ajax is and how you would hand-code this sort of stuff. He then did a very short introduction of JSF and how the combination of the two make you future-proof. Who says Ajax is here to stay. What new technology might we have in 3-5 years. If you hand-code all this Ajax stuff or use Ajax libraries you might be stuck with old legacy stuff in 5 years. When using a components based approach you just have to get your vendor to upgrade the rendering of their components and you can ride the waves of whatever new technology comes along. Basically Oracle is doing that right now. The current ADF components have something called partial page rendering, which is Ajax-alike but uses IFrames. In the version 11 it will all be Ajax, but it’s still the same components. You current IFrame using components will just start using Ajax as a new underlying technology.

That’s what I always say about Ajax. I think it’s a great technology that can enable a lot of cool new features, but it’s something for the component developers not for me as a business developer.

Duncan gave a short demo building the new Rich Table in JDeveloper 11g. I managed to get a short movie of that with my photo camera. The quality is not that great, but you get the idea. In the movie you can see that normal horizontal scrollbars can be used to browse through your table. When scrolling quickly it even shows a nice spinning clock to indicate it is busy. You can also see that in the thumbnail. You can even reorder all the columns and do things like sorting.

He than continued with a more lengthy (and prepared) demo they also gave at JavaOne. I’ve split that up in a number of smaller videos showing the different features. The first one shows the use of expaning and collapsing accordeons. The next one shows a rich table with details below it. You can see the details refreshing on row-navigation without any apparent page refresh. The third video shows the possibility of drag-and-drop which I think is really cool. The fourth video shows the reordering of columns in a rich table as we also saw on the first demo. The fifth demo shows a link that automitcally requerys, reorders and refreshes a rich table in another accordeon. The sixth and final video shows the recalculation of the shipping costs when you click a shipper.

It al seems very smooth and user friendly. I’ve put the entire demo in a 3 minute movie at the end. Just click the thumbnails to download the movies.

Update 2 February 2007: Oracle has also published a demo showing ADF Faces with Ajax technology.

Initial demo showing the new RichTable component (1:00 - 5.8Mb)

Demo of the new Accordeon (0:34 - 3.2Mb)

RichTable component with details below the table (0:07 - 0.8Mb)

Drag-and-drop demo (0:15 - 1.4Mb)

Reordering of columns in a RichTable (0:06 - 0.6Mb)

Link to requery a RichTable (0:09 - 0.9Mb)

Recalculate shipping (0:32 - 3.0Mb)

Full JavaOne demo (3:09 - 18Mb)

ADF Toystore on OTN

The long awaited ADF version of Steve Muench’s toystore demo is available on OTN! The previous (non-ADF) version of the toystore demo was a great way to get to know JDeveloper and J2EE development. It is a tutorial in which some real-world problems are tackled. This is so much more valuable then most tutorials that only show the very basics. Once you start developing your own applications, you’ll notice that it is not that simple as the tutorial made you believe.

I’m looking forward to go through the ADF Toystore demo step-by-step.