Oracle E-Business Suite Development: New Technologies
 by: Riccardo Lanzuolo

We have already talked about the importance of Java Technologies at “Oracle E-Business Suite Customization: New Directions”. Not only for Oracle Company itself, but also for the Oracle E-Business customers, whose investments must be preserved. Now we present tools and frameworks, you will use if you intend to develop in Java:

• Java Language Itself: is an object oriented language, so if you are not used with this paradigm, we strongly advice you to study this already established paradigm. To develop in Java you will use a lot of standards and libraries, they are known by its name, J2ME, J2SE and J2EE, to portable, standard and enterprise applications respectively;

• JDeveloper: is an integrated development environment (IDE) built in Java for Java development. It is complete considering the development life cycle, so you can model, code, debug, test and deploy. It is prepared for Web, XML, Web Services, SQL, J2EE and Oracle ADF development. Provide built-in features for open sources tools and frameworks, such as Struts, Ant, JUnit and CVS. According to Oracle, JDeveloper is the tool of choice for Forms, Reports and Designer customers because it carries a similar development model.

• Struts: is a java framework considered a de facto standard to build web applications. Struts is a solution to organize what was happing when people used Java Servlets and JSP freely. Struts implements the MVC (Model / View / Controller) pattern, so you might separate business logic (Model) from web application flow of control (Controller) and JSP/html code (View).

• J2EE: is an architecture to define standards to solve enterprise level problems, like persistence, scalability, availability, security, distributed computing, etc. This standard should be followed by application server vendors, so a J2EE application would run on any J2EE application server complaint, like Oracle OC4J (OAS), IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, JBoss, etc. It is not a simple architecture to solve a simple problem. Get ready to study and understand the complexity of enterprise programming (we will deal with this matter on others papers to help you).

• EJB: is a J2EE standard to define components to write business logic at the server side (Session Beans), to define a domain layer to access data (Entity Beans) and to deal with asynchronous and queuing messages (Message Driven Beans). The last EJB standard release (the 3.0), not commonly used yet, became much easier to develop with. The previous one (the 2.0 and 2.1) should be used with a series of design patterns to solve common problems, what make the code not so easy to program and understand. The first one (the 1.0 and 1.1) was useless to enterprise level development; it did not implement even a one to many relationship.

• Oracle ADF: according to Oracle, ADF is an application development framework design to simplify J2EE development and bring productivity and ease of use of Oracle forms to the J2EE platform. ADF with JDeveloper is the best choice for Oracle E-Business Suite, because Oracle made this environment familiar to Oracle Forms, Reports and Designer developers.

Next papers we go deeper about J2EE and Oracle E-Business Suite Development.

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About The Author

Riccardo Lanzuolo is technical consultant at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) - Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains, Navision, Axapta MS CRM, Oracle Financials and IBM Lotus Domino Partner, serving corporate customers in the following industries: Aerospace & Defense, Medical & Healthcare, Distribution & Logistics, Hospitality, Banking & Finance, Wholesale & Retail, Chemicals, Oil & Gas, Placement & Recruiting, Advertising & Publishing, Textile, Pharmaceutical, Non-Profit, Beverages, Conglomerates, Apparels, Durables, Manufacturing and having locations in multiple states and internationally.

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