In the past, while third party books and online trainings have tried to help new users get started with the Oracle ADF framework, our own documentation that ships with the product has focused on providing online reference material, also known as "[F1] Help and JavaDoc". There is a lot of conceptual material in the online help as well, but it's not organized in a way you can easily read end-to-end like a book to assist yourself in getting started. I'm pleased to report that for our 10.1.3 major release, as a team we're doing something major about this.
We've heard loud and clear that what's missing in the base documentation set is a proper ADF Developer's Guide you can read cover to cover and learn all the fundamentals of using the framework. We've studied our current and future potential customer base and have identified two key constituencies to target as part of helping people get started quickly with Oracle ADF, based on their background and priorities for declarative development:
- One group comprises developers coming from 4GL tools like Oracle Forms, Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, or other similar environments for whom a maximally declarative end-to-end development experience is top priority. The 4000+ developers in our own Oracle Applications division (and growing!) fall into this category, along with thousands of existing JDeveloper/Oracle ADF developers and partners outside of Oracle. This group also includes existing Oracle Forms and Oracle Designer customers who might be thinking to target J2EE development for a future new application project. These developers appreciate the prescriptive business tier approach that ADF Business Components provides to complement the other layers of the overall ADF framework. You can already see our focus ramping up steadily over the past year on this important target audience by visiting the J2EE Application Developer for Forms and Designers home page on OTN.
- The other group are experienced J2EE developers for whom maximum implementation flexibility in the business service tier is top priority. These developers will appreciate the value-add of our declarative databinding layer, but prefer creating their own business domain classes, mapping them with Oracle Toplink, and building service facades using EJB Session Beans. This crowd includes numerous J2EE architects and consultants in Oracle Consulting's Java Technology Practice, as well as many existing developers with years of J2EE experience under their belt, but who might be new to Oracle ADF.
So, as part of our general improvements for the "Out of Box Experience" for JDeveloper 10.1.3 and Oracle ADF, our documentation and product management teams are working hard on delivering the following (along with, or as soon as possible after) the JDeveloper 10.1.3 production release:
- Numerous new "Cue Cards" that are focused tutorials built-in to the product that cover general J2EE application-building basics with little mini-lessons you can follow right from within the tool.
- A comprehensive service request tracking system sample application that shows off numerous new features and best practices. Initially the demo will be JSF-based. A Swing version will follow the initial web one due to timing. Two functionally identical versions of the sample are being implemented, one using the EJB/Toplink business tier technology and the other leveraging the ADF Business Components.
- Two parallel ADF Developer's Guides that explain the concepts and implementation details of the above "SRDemoSample" application, in a readable manual format. One guide will appeal to the Forms/4GL developer crowd, and the other to the experienced J2EE developer audience.
Both demos and manuals share common structure, functionality, and look and feel. They both use the Oracle ADF Model layer for data binding, the Oracle ADF Faces JSF components for their user interface, and JSF controller features. While the books will share a lot of explanatory material, we've decided to keep them separate so that explanations can be as specific as possible to the implementation choice without confusing developers who prefer the other choice. By being inclusive and catering to both of these developer profiles, we're hoping that these extra efforts will help us expand our customer base from our current thousands of Oracle ADF customers up to the tens of thousands level by making it much easier to get started with a best-practices use of the technology without having to hunt around for one-off how-to articles and sample code.
As you might imagine, I'm directly involved with the ADF Business Components related demos and ADF Developer's Guide. We also have several other product managers who are involved part time in authoring 3rd party books on Oracle ADF- and J2EE-related technologies, so we hope this wealth of resources will benefit all in the coming months. So, if we aren't as quick at answering questions on the OTN Forums these days, now you understand more about what we are working on behind the scenes alongside our core Dev and QA teams who are focusing on making sure the 10.1.3 product itself is of the highest quality, too!
1:35:25 PM 
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