Oracle ADF Survival Guide: Mastering the Application Development Framework

Whether you consider yourself a beginner, intermediate, or advanced developer of ADF applications or are new to the subject, this book will be useful to you. After a detailed read, I can firmly state that that Mr. Vesterli has accomplished the promise of the book's title as well as a promise in the Introduction that this survival guide "contains all the information you need to become a competent ADF developer." This book really does combine the contents of all other getting started, intermediate, and advanced books now available on ADF and is therefore a great resource for all levels of ADF developers.I have used and studied ADF since its beginning, and I have to admit that when I started reading the book, I was skeptical of those promises because other authors have not fully realized that goal. However, I found this book to be an extremely complete explanation of all the ADF work needed to create an application. For example, the book covers a subject often set aside for the interest of page count, testing and diagnostics, and even explains the sophisticated Oracle Diagnostics Log Analyzer.The only subject that I couldn't find -- creating an EAR file and deploying to Oracle WebLogic Server -- was probably omitted because deployment is often considered a post-development task assigned to a Server Administrator. Generation of an ADF library JAR is sufficiently explained and that process is similar to generation of an EAR file.Although the discussions seem to focus on ADF Release 12c, most of the material is equally applicable to 11g. The author correctly assumes that most modern application developers can find menu items and development operations in Eclipse or JDeveloper without a step-by-step list of what to click. This is one of the secrets to the book's ability to be "short and sweet."Speaking of short and sweet, this book shines in its brevity (less than 200 pages), which makes the Big Picture of how the pieces of ADF fit together easier to assimilate. Another shining feature is the author's approach to the topic; where other ADF books have taken the approach of explaining features and frameworks and possible options contained in those frameworks, this book is organized around logical parts of the application and tasks you would need to accomplish.For example, instead of describing the FacesContext class in detail, that subject is introduced in a section called "Interacting with the User" because programming user interaction into the application is a task, and by the way, you need to know about FacesContext to complete that task. So the author focuses on the task at hand and explains enough of the technology to accomplish the task, which also leads to an understanding of how that technology could solve other problems. Also, the book contains copious code examples, which can be used as patterns for your own code.In addition, and this is a feature I found unique to this book, the author boldly sprinkles best practices into the discussions with words like "You should always create your own ADF business component base classes..." It's not that this is the only book that contains best practices for ADF; it's more that this book bases its discussions around best practices. The book doesn't offer you all the possible options, it just gives you The Best Way. Without this kind of advice, you can quickly run into trouble or, even worse, experience trouble later in the development process.The best practices in this book do not just represent the opinions of a well-respected, very-knowledgeable expert; they also represent the opinions of the ADF developer community, who over the years has come up with what works and what doesn't. The refined gold that resulted from many years of discovering best practices is contained in this book. In a way, that previous books have not achieved this level of completeness about The Best Way is not all their fault -- they were written while the very best practices for ADF usage were still being discovered. Another way to say this is that the material in this book is the highest evolution of the best way the ADF community has found to understand and develop applications with ADF. This is information you will not find in the Oracle documentation or in any one source anywhere else.That Oracle's development tools focus has recently spun off into JavaScript technologies does not diminish the broad appeal and popularity of ADF; Oracle still uses ADF for its applications as do Oracle's customers. So this book will be useful to many developers. ADF is a highly-refined, extremely-powerful tool and this book makes it easy to understand that power as well as how to best use that power to create solid applications.In summary, I'll close with my best practice: when you want to know more about ADF, buy this book and assimilate its contents.