Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Mixing ADF with HTML5/JQuery/REST?

In my previous posts I showed you how to develop a simple JSON REST api and incorporate it with a standard HTML5/JQuery mobile application. All of this was accomplished with JDeveloper.

What it didn't include was ADF Faces ...

Why not? Well ... As of today ADF Mobile uses a framework that "extends" Oracle's ADF framework. So why didn't I show you this instead? Well, I didn't really like how the mobile framework handled my mobile sites I designed. It was still a bit clunky and didn't really flow well. So I looked into developing my mobile applications using JQuery and HTML5.

In order to handle my database interactions I turned to REST. With the latest version of Jdeveloper 11g R2 it has expanded it's capability to include REST services (libraries) into it's development framework.

So I turned to 11.1.2.1(or 2) to build my simple REST services. I was still able to successfully deploy them to my 10.3.5 (production needs a patchset I believe). But I still developed my mobile app in 11.1.1.5. I only needed JDeveloper really to just deploy the application so it would run on the same domain (JSON is not cross-domain compatible without JSONP).

Now ... I recently received a comment asking when I was going to develop this mobile application using ADF Faces. Well ... I hadn't planned on it. I was just going to show you that the same REST services could be used like any other business service (web service, WSDL, Etc.) in your ADF application for re-usability purposes.

I did however look into seeing if I could combine the functionality of ADF Faces with HTML5/JQuery/REST. Even migrating my application over from 11.1.1.5 to 11.1.2.2 and leveraging the new feature of "Pretty URLS" making REST calls from a .jsf or .jspx didn't function properly.
It still did not function properly ... I think I'm going to just chalk this one up to AJAX/JS code interfering (wrapped) with my JQuery mobile code.

Brian Huff has a nice presentation discussing the Next-Generation Oracle Mobile Applications

For now I will build my mobile applications using standard HTML5/JQuery/REST services. I hope when PS6 is released it will then make it a little easier to port my code over to the ADF Mobile PS6 framework. We'll just have to wait and see ...

I welcome any comments or suggestions you might have. I'm still learning as well ...

1 comment:

  1. Hi Kyle,
    I stumbled on this post while looking for information on how people are using HTML5/CSS3 in ADF web applications (not mobile). ADF is clunky... but HTML 5/CSS3 have so much to offer! Do you by any chance have experience (re)defining ADF styles to have a custom look and feel?

    Thanks,
    Candace

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