Chapter 2. An Introduction to Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF

As outlined in the previous chapter, Oracle chose Java EE, SOA, and Web 2.0 as the technology pillars for the Fusion initiative. Each of these pillars includes a veritable alphabet soup of technologies and standards: JPA, EJB, JDBC, BPEL, DOM, SOAP, WSDL, XML, and HTML, to name only a few. And herein lies the fundamental problem: to use these technologies, developers feel they have to pretty much know them inside out, which, arguably, is beyond the abilities of all but the most elite developers.

To many developers who are used to a declarative or fourth-generation programming language (4GL) approach to development, including Oracle E-Business Suite developers, the Fusion initiative might seem like a step back into the Dark Ages. Rather than focusing development effort on writing code to solve a business problem, the developer was now going to be confronted with a Pandora’s box of technologies that had to be understood, integrated, and maintained. Even using external solutions from third parties only added to the integration headache by introducing a mishmash of code and licenses.