I'm in a company re-writing the existing applications, using the full Oracle stack, in a SOA way.
Everything is nice and so on until we're starting to discuss the UI. We are wondering what to use as web framework in order to web application.
In the first hand, we are developers in love with NodeJS and frameworks like Ember.js, we're developing today (until the application is migrated) in Ruby on Rails (so working with Macs). In the other hand, Oracle is providing ADF which is obviously well integrated in the Oracle stack and so on. But when we compare ADF to the way we are working today (Ruby on Rails) or the way we would work in the future (with Ember.js for instance) it looks like less development, more point and click, with an heavy framework.
What are the advantages of ADF ?
What are the right domains where ADF make sense ?
How popular is ADF ? (Especially in the enterprise context)
How hard is the learning of ADF for someone developing today with Ruby On Rails (IDE is Sublime Text, so all is about writing code -- mouse not needed) while for ADF JDeveloper seems mandatory (seems a large use of the mouse and less writing code ?)
I hope my post is understandable.
I've used in production java frameworks like Struts, Struts2, JBoss Seam, Tapestry, Spring, Hibernate and I've moved to ADF 6 years ago, therefore I can't comment on how ADF compares with NodeJS or Ember.js.
What are the advantages of ADF ?
ADF has in Jdeveloper a strong development tool support. If your team is not technically very strong in Java, it might be the right tool for you.
What are the right domains where ADF make sense ?
Web applications providing Desktop-like experience: that means complex input forms, complex querying - screens with lots of data and business rules. By far the most productive framework I've used when building these kind of web applications.
How popular is ADF ? (Especially in the enterprise context)
ADF is a niche at the moment. Though it is strongly supported by Oracle. Most of Oracle's products - e.g. Fusion Apps - are based on ADF, so ADF is here to stay.
How hard is the learning of ADF for someone developing today with Ruby
On Rails (IDE is Sublime Text, so all is about writing code -- mouse
not needed) while for ADF JDeveloper seems mandatory (seems a large
use of the mouse and less writing code ?)
At start, it will look like you are having good progress in relatively short period of time. Then, you will realise that even though Jdeveloper does 'everything' for you, you need to understand every piece of code JDeveloper generates. ADF has a steep learning curve (though you may find others telling you otherwise), it requires a different way of thinking web application development, especially difficult for developers with previous web experience: ADF is using a STATEFUL business layer. So, unless you have been using Stateful Session Beans before, there are good chances to mess up your first ADF Design - is what I keep seeing as ADF consultant. But once you've learn it, productivity-wise is fantastic.
From innovation point of view, ADF sounds like listening to Vanilla Ice in your Beats headsets: it is based on XML, it uses JSF, no sign of dependency injection on ADF Faces. Still, is Ajax-based.
Related
We have an oracle forms application, and one of the many thoughts (considered converting to non-oracle-form technology) was to use JHeadStart (oracle product) that converts the oracle forms to ADF application. But we would like to not use ADF, so is there any way that we can remove the dependency on ADF?
If anyone feels this is not the question to ask, instead of giving me -ve marks please comment me and I will remove this question.
Thanks.
As always, it depends on what you want to achieve. I don't know JHeadStart, but to me, it sounds like a tool converting a legacy application to a framework that might be considered legacy soon. There are a few supporters of ADF, so I believe it's a good thing if you're ready to live with the compromises a full-stack framework brings. But in general, ADF is not popular among JSF developers (mostly because of those compromises, which often turn out to be too restrictive). Even more generally speaking, JSF is not popular among UI developers. That, in turn, is a bit unfair, but I observe a huge movement to pure JavaScript UI frameworks.
This indicates that using a tool like JHeadStart isn't the most future-proof approach. It's (probably) good to survive the next month, but in the long run, it'll probably backfire.
Let's have a look at the question from another angle. Why do you want to get rid of Oracle forms? Most likely, it's because of recruiting problems, but it might also have something to do with architecture. Oracle Forms supports a programming style integrating the database layer tightly with the UI layer. That's a very efficient way to write small applications, but it scales badly if your application grows.
So I'd recommend spending some extra money and time to re-implement your application from scratch. Automated tools tend to generate code that's hard to maintain. Re-designing your application from scratch gives you the opportunity to build an application that lasts a decade.
Oh, and I don't think it's possible to use JHeadStart without introducing ADF. Simply because JHeadStart has been designed with ADF in mind.
I am building a new web app but i feel i don't have the big picture representation that I wish to have before building it so I am looking for resources to really understanding the web as whole throughout the full stack.
I've been a self-taught web developer since 2006 but I took a long break during university in 2010 and finished in 2014 and came out and the whole picture of web had changed.
I was familiar with the LAMP architecture and back then as long as you understood PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, MySQL, HTML & CSS you were fine; now MEAN is making a lot of noise and i just took a look at what Facebook is built with and it talks of HipHop which I have never heard of before and i feel quite lost with frameworks and languages popping out every other week.
I basically am looking for resources to understand the web as a whole, not just to create web pages so I can make informed decisions about building this and any other web app in the future. I want to know how all these new technologies are fitting into the picture.
Thank you
The big picture is you need a database, a data access layer that talks to that database, something to route the requests and something to display the result to the page.
There are lots of frameworks / technologies. IMO the LAMP stack is a bit old school. Not that it's not fit for purpose, it's just there are faster, better, easier stacks than that.
In terms of development languages and frameworks I would check out
Ruby-on-rails,
Spring-boot (with MVC, JPA, freemarker + mysql),
ASP.NET5
For databases mysql is always really popular because it's free. H2 is a free in memory database, I thinks it's a nice db to get up and running real fast.
Generally these days data access Is done through some sort of 'Object Relational Mapper' framework like Hibernate (if ur using Java), Linq (if ur using ASP.NET) or whatever ruby on rails uses.
For the view technology html, css is obviously standard but lately Bootstrap3 is really popular as a front end UI framework to make things a lot easier. In terms of Javascript, jQuery is basically a defacto standard these days. Something like Knockout.js or Angular.js provides nice data binding between your model and your view to make things a lot easier.
Not to mention as an extra layer these days people are also putting their apps inside Docker containers and deploying them that way for maximum portability. So that is something that is new and to you won't have seen before if you've been away from the game for a while.
Anyway, my favourite is the spring-boot stack. It has an embedded instance of the Tomcat web server and it comes all auto configured.
I believe the main changes that affected the course of current web development scenariois related to cloud based services, like Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Virtual Private Servers (VPS).
Now is cheaper and possible to plan and develop a distributed environment to achieve a massive numbers of users. Servers are adapting their technologies to this new scenario and to providing easy webservices endpoints for mobile clients via REST APIs (like Google, Facebook, Soundcloud and almost every other service provider) using JSON for small data transfers between server ans clients.
This is the present and near future of web development. And we can no more close our eyes to mobile. Te mobile first era is comming.
You can use LAMP stack for webdevelopment, with or without frameworks like zend, cakephp and others, but the end product will be a REST or RESTfull service provider and a client to consume the services and integrate with many 3rdParties like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon services to build modern applications.
As for databases, there are now distributed non relacional noSQL hadoop, mongodb, mariadb bring more options to plan robust infra-structure and flexible ajustable for all needs.
To create a great web platform is necessary to know the existence of all this tools and possibilities, but specialize and deep learn only the tools you will choose to develop, because it is impossÃvel learn everything, our brain cant handle :) and all se em to update very fast in this area.
Choose right one is difficult, there is a lot of options, but the main concept will be always the same, there will be a provider and consumer fronts, distributed or non-distributed, and a multi layered development involving UI, integration, business and data (big data) manipulation. But now on the Cloud.
You can find good official material for Php, amazon webservices, nonSQL databases, common 3rdparty APIs like Google Apps, Facebook...REST clients end framework, JSON...and there is a lot of good alternative sources too...get some open-source project example on Github (GIT is another mandatory tool to learn).
I particulary develop in Java now, Linux/MySQL/Tomcat on amazon AWS infra-structure, using Java-JSP for server and web client, and Java for Android..I just have to deal with Java environments and one language for Server (webserver and SO programs) and clients (web and mobile) development.
Well I hope I could help, I dont know if this is exactly the answer also if I made it clear cause my english is basic...
Well, have a nice weekend.
Leo
I am fairly new to Azure and mobile services, and all the examples and tutorials I can find for the table and API scripts are fairly simplistic.
If I have some processes that are fairly complex and rely on pulling information from many different tables and processing contingent on that data, should I be doing that somewhere other than the API scripts? I am new to node.js as well so maybe that's the problem but I was wondering if there is a more appropriate place for business logic, such as some bridge I need to add to my stack?
There are a lot of examples of how to use MSSql object which is used to query tables and Node in general available. A healthy search will reveal just about anything you need. Since you said you are new to Node.js consider using the .NET backend instead. It is based on Entity Framework and there are lots of Entity framework examples out there for you too. Finally, there are some really good examples of complex logic being used in the back ends in the sample code available: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/develop/mobile/ios-samples/ (pick your client OS) and here: http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/topics/mobile/ and here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/azuremobile/
Let us know if you have specific questions!
Azure, probably ASP.NET Webforms. We're building a management interface for about 8 tables. Usual CRUD :-)
2 backend users, and doesn't need to look flash.
We'd like to use Mindscape's LightSpeed as the ORM tool
Question: Is Dynamic Data worth pursuing? (Mindscape have a connector to DD).
We've also got the Telerik Suite which is next on the list to check out.
Rapid development here is key.
For rapid development, Dynamic Data is great. In its current form it has some good extension points. However, I think you are stuck with either Entity Framework or Linq to SQL for O/RM solutions. Not necessarily a bad thing for an 8 table app, but something to consider.
I just started getting into BizTalk at work and would love to keep using everything I've learned about DDD, TDD, etc. Is this even possible or am I always going to have to use the Visio like editors when creating things like pipelines and orchestrations?
You can certainly apply a lot of the concepts of TDD and DDD to BizTalk development.
You can design and develop around the concept of domain objects (although in BizTalk and integration development I often find interface objects or contract first design to be a more useful way of thinking - what messages get passed around at my interfaces). And you can also follow the 'Build the simplest possible thing that will work' and 'only build things that make tests pass' philosophies of TDD.
However, your question sounds like you are asking more about the code-centric sides of these design and development approaches.
Am I right that you would like to be able to follow the test driven development approach of first writing a unti test that exercises a requirement and fails, then writing a method that fulfils the requirement and causes the test to pass - all within a traditional programing language like C#?
For that, unfortunately, the answer is no. The majority of BizTalk artifacts (pipelines, maps, orchestrations...) can only really be built using the Visual Studio BizTalk plugins. There are ways of viewing the underlying c# code, but one would never want to try and directly develop this code.
There are two tools BizUnit and BizUnit Extensions that give some ability to control the execution of BizTalk applications and test them but this really only gets you to the point of performing more controled and more test driven integration tests.
The shapes that you drag onto the Orchestration design surface will largely just do their thing as one opaque unit of execution. And Orchestrations, pipelines, maps etc... all these things are largely intended to be executed (and tested) within an entire BizTalk solution.
Good design practices (taking pointers from approaches like TDD) will lead to breaking BizTalk solutions into smaller, more modular and testable chunks, and are there are ways of testing things like pipelines in isolation.
But the detailed specifics of TDD and DDD in code sadly don't translate.
For some related discussion that may be useful see this question:
Mocking WebService consumed by a Biztalk Request-Response port
If you often make use of pipelines and custom pipeline components in BizTalk, you might find my own PipelineTesting library useful. It allows you to use NUnit (or whatever other testing framework you prefer) to create automated tests for complete pipelines, specific pipeline components or even schemas (such as flat file schemas).
It's pretty useful if you use this kind of functionality, if I may say so myself (I make heavy use of it on my own projects).
You can find an introduction to the library here, and the full code on github. There's also some more detailed documentation on its wiki.
I agree with the comments by CKarras. Many people have cited that as their reason for not liking the BizUnit framework. But take a look at BizUnit 3.0. It has an object model that allows you to write the entire test step in C#/VB instead of XML. BizUnitExtensions is being upgraded to the new object model as well.
The advantages of the XML based system is that it is easier to generate test steps and there is no need to recompile when you update the steps. In my own Extensions library, I found the XmlPokeStep (inspired by NAnt) to be very useful. My team could update test step xml on the fly. For example, lets say we had to call a webservice that created a customer record and then checked a database for that same record. Now if the webservice returned the ID (dynamically generated), we could update the test step for the next step on the fly (not in the same xml file of course) and then use that to check the database.
From a coding perspective, the intellisense should be addressed now in BizUnit 3.0. The lack of an XSD did make things difficult in the past. I'm hoping to get an XSD out that will aid in the intellisense. There were some snippets as well for an old version of BizUnit but those havent been updated, maybe if theres time I'll give that a go.
But coming back to the TDD issue, if you take some of the intent behind TDD - the specification or behavior driven element, then you can apply it to some extent to Biztalk development as well because BizTalk is based heavily on contract driven development. So you can specify your interfaces first and create stub orchestrations etc to handle them and then build out the core. You could write the BizUnit tests at that time. I wish there were some tools that could automate this process but right now there arent.
Using frameworks such as the ESB guidance can also help give you a base platform to work off so you can implement the major use cases through your system iteratively.
Just a few thoughts. Hope this helps. I think its worth blogging about more extensively.
This is a good topic to discuss.Do ping me if you have any questions or we can always discuss more over here.
Rgds
Benjy
You could use BizUnit to create and reuse generic test cases both in code and excel(for functional scenarios)
http://www.codeplex.com/bizunit
BizTalk Server 2009 is expected to have more IDE integrated testability.
Cheers
Hemil.
BizUnit is really a pain to use because all the tests are written in XML instead of a programming language.
In our projects, we have "ported" parts of BizUnit to a plain old C# test framework. This allows us to use BizUnit's library of steps directly in C# NUnit/MSTest code. This makes tests that are easier to write (using VS Intellisense), more flexible, and most important, easier to debug in case of a test failure. The main drawback of this approach is that we have forked from the main BizUnit source.
Another interesting option I would consider for future projects is BooUnit, which is a Boo wrapper on top of BizUnit. It has advantages similar to our BizUnit "port", but also has the advantage of still using BizUnit instead of forking from it.