In the more and more populair Service Oriented Architecture, websites and web application are often based on services and no longer tightly coupled to a database. This has several advantages, however, the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) does not necessarily support this in a very satisfactory way.
Working with web services in a SOA environment usually involves working with XML. Traditionally there are a few good ways to work with XML in ADF, these are described under the chapter Alternatives. However, there is now a new way of handling XML within ADF.
The ‘ADF EMG XML Data Control’ is an easy and declaratively way to set up ADF Data Controls on XML files, services or payloads.
The technique for using the XML Data Control is similar to that of the standard ADF web service Data Control, but with better support for complex types and the ability to customize the datacontrol behavior at both design time and run time.
This Data Control can be used the same as any other Data Control for dragging and dropping on pages.
Lets take a moment and see how the XML Data Control fits in the ADF architecture, below an illustration of the already available abstraction layers in Oracle ADF.
When working on a page(fragment) in ADF, by default this page works through the ADF Binding layer. The Binding layer provides a consistent interface to the data regardless of where it comes from. The ADF Data Control again provides a consistent interface, abstracting the implementation technology from the business service and describing the service’s operations and data collections.
Our goal was to create a new way of handling XML in ADF, but staying close to the default ADF framework and thus the comfort zone of the ADF developer. Creating a custom ADF Data Control seemed the way to go, because building a page(fragment) would be all the same, once the Data Control would be in place at Design Time.
Version 1.0 has been released on 30th September at Oracle Open World in 2014. Since then, already several companies have been involved in a proof of concept and/or are implementing the ADF EMG XML Data Control in their production code.