Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
For our purposes, we are only going to use one piece of the overall framework,
namely, ADF Business Components. This provides a declarative framework
for implementing business services, including Service Data Objects (that is,
standards-based Entity services).
For those readers familiar with the SOA Suite 10gR3, this may seem a strange
choice, and certainly prior to the 11gR1 release of Oracle Fusion Middleware, there
was little synergy between Oracle ADF and the Oracle SOA Suite, with earlier
versions of ADF more targeted at providing a Java development framework for
Oracle Forms developers.
However, with 11gR1 that has changed, with a number of significant integrations
between the respective product stacks, including:
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ADF Business Components are used to implement Service Data Objects
Service Data Objects can be referenced as entity variables in BPEL
The Human Worklist application is implemented in ADF
JDeveloper automatically generates Worklist Task Forms in ADF
BAM objects can be embedded in ADF user interfaces
ADF Business Components can publish events to the Event Delivery
Network
In this chapter, we will provide a brief introduction to ADF Business Components
and how we can use them to implement Service Data Objects. We will then examine
how we can reference SDOs within an SOA composite, and in particular how we
can use entity variables in a BPEL process to reference an SDO as if it were a local
BPEL variable.
Note that there is nothing to stop you from developing your services in Java, EJBs,
and PL/SQL, and then exposing them as web services. Indeed, JDeveloper provides
excellent tooling for this very purpose.
