ADFUtils + JSFUtils ... how come they're not in the base JDev release?

Question

Hi JDev gang
A question came up from a client the other day, is how come ADFUtils and JSFUtils that appear in many of the Oracle JDev demos aren't included in the base JDev release? They seem like such obvious things to include in a base ADF Faces/RC project and for Oracle to expand upon, yet we currently have to "steal" the code for our own projects and include them.
What are others' thoughts on this? Do you find these 2 classes indispensable for ADF Faces/RC development?
Cheers,
CM.

Answer 1

Ah, the ugly can of Java annotation worms. Sure you want to open it? ;)
Personally I'd love to see annotations introduced to masively reduce the complexity of Java JSF beans, and also the Java ADF BC side.
One of the bits I see students really struggle with when teaching JDev is the unnecessary exposed Java methods in the ADF BC classes, such as the EntityImpl getAttrInvokeAccessor, setAttrInvokeAccessor, createPrimaryKey. Beginner non Java students really can only think about objects like POJOs, they struggle when they see lots of framework code added. As such hiding the detail using annotations should in theory make this eaiser.
Regards the backing beans and injecting the binding container, iterator etc. I note between JDev 10.1.3 when it first came out, we were injecting bindings via the faces-config.xml file. This worked badly because new users struggled with getting the config file entries exactly to match the backing bean properties and accessor names.
Then ADFUtils + JSFUtils came along which meant no injection was required, but now people are struggling with what to cast the result to (using something like JSFUtils.resolveExpression). As they don't inherently know the binding classes, what to cast to becomes a problem. The IDE doesn't help with this at all either.
As such with the annotation approach, this would be better as the annotation would take care of returning the correct binding classes. This would take us to the next level. Also as the IDE would inherently know which binding class, then users would be better off in understanding the binding layer classes and which methods to call thanks to the code completion facilities. Of course it means someway of associating a backing bean with a particular page such that the BB knows which binding container to get, which iterators to include etc, and if the binding names are changed in the page def, the BB would automatically change its names (I figure you'd have to do this for beginners, otherwise they'd get confused).
However, I think there is still a need for ADFUtils and JSFUtils even with annotations because there will be times where you want to do something that isn't provided by the annotations.
Cheers,
CM.