Me == BC4J Newbie
I'm a relative newbie to Business Components for Java (cough, erm I mean "ADF Business Components" of course). The extent of my BC4J knowledge to this point can best be described as "futile tinkering". The areas of JDeveloper I'm involved with are erm... a bit low level. External tools and version control are pretty J2SE-centric, and this doesn't leave a lot of scope for playing with web applications. Most of my exposure to BC4J comes from testing it to see how well it works with version control.
One web-ish area I am involved with is the OTN Update Wizard (you can invoke it from Help->Check for Updates...). No new functionality has been added to this area for a while, but I'm ramping up for a whole raft of changes for the release after 10g. Part of this will involve reimplementing the database and web application that run on OTN at the back end of the wizard you see in JDeveloper.
Now the existing implementation is... erm... a bit... well... it wasn't exactly thoroughly designed. The "Check for Updates" functionality was a last minute addition to the 9.0.3 release (so last-minute that I actually started it after the official code freeze for that release). The original goal was just to get something working as quickly as possible with the minimum of fuss. To that end, it was implemented with a kind of esoteric mixture of technologies I knew a little bit about at the time: SQLJ, XSQL, XSLT and JSP.
The result of this rapid implementation frippery is that now it's a bit of an unmaintainable beast. When OTN recently changed their authentication technology, it was a bit of a nightmare to fix JDeveloper to compensate for the changes. The web application we use to actually publish updates for the wizard has suffered terminal web-rot and can no longer actually be used. Instead we have to use SQL*Plus to insert updates to the center. That's kind of low level. I like low level, but INSERT statements take the biscuit.
So what does BC4J have to do with all this? I've seen the light of ADF. More specifically, I've discovered the struts page flow modeler and the data binding palette in JDeveloper. And grief, these things are actually useful. You can actually use them to create applications really quickly. So, given that I need to re-implement this gnarly (but small) web application on OTN, I guess the choice of technology for doing it is pretty clear. On top of this, it's high time I learned a bit more about BC4J, and this is going to be my vehicle for doing so.
I'm just at the "tinker and play" stage right now, but expect future blog updates from a bc4j newbie discovering this strange, but curiously useful new world for the first time....
9:58:09 PM 
|
