Saturday, May 10, 2008

Redefining FUBAR: Oracle ADF

Oracle developers are highly skilled and highly valued resources. They love code, and can write PL/SQL in a command line-like interface like nobody's business.

Oracle has acquired so many companies - that they need to have a way to build applications around the vast number of products in a vast number of tools.

Oracle loves Java, Linux and has finally realized that Oracle Forms and Oracle Reports absolutely suck.

So, they're looking to put together an alternative. JavaServer Faces is one way to go (open, Java = good). So, they decided to make it "easy" for developers to create J2EE applications in a browser with all that fancy AJAX stuff.

Sounds great!

But, yet again, they have created the most convoluted, complex, hard-to-set-up, code-oriented, no-way-in-hell-anyone-but-a-Java-programmer-can-ever-use-it solution: Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF).

Don't believe me? I DARE you to open this page - and don't even read it - but just scroll down it. It's OK, I'll wait...

Cool, huh? Now THAT'S EASY!

I'm no Java programmer - in fact I'm no 4GL programmer (any more) - but even I can use Servoy to create and deploy both client server and full AJAX web applications against an Oracle database (or 3, or 5 or 10), a Sybase database, SQL Server database, a MySQL database, AND a DB2 database - at the same time, on the same form in 5 minutes or less.

Really. I do it all the time.

Servoy gives me the speed of using a traditional 4GL, but it's at LEAST 5 times faster to build and deploy and 100 TIMES easier to set up and configure than ADF. Or Ruby on Rails. Or ColdFusion. Or Flash. Or Gears. Or AIR. Or OpenLazlo.

Do yourself a favor - if you haven't checked out Servoy lately - do it NOW! Also, watch for the upcoming public preview of their new Eclipse-based Servoy 4.0. It's even MORE productive than what they have now.

1 comment:

Data Mosaic said...

the link was priceless :)

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