JDev and ADF is difficult

Question

As a new user to ADF I am finding ADF and JDev a little discouraging and hard to use. I did a search on how to improve jdev's performance and found a lot of useful tips and tricks to use, but I pose the question. Shouldn't it just work out of the box? Coming from a web 2.0 background developing EE applications using Spring, JPA/Hibernate, Extjs, and netbeans I keep thinking to myself wow how in the world should I have known that changing this or that table attribute causes this or that to behave differently. For example I read a thread on multi-selecting table rows and in this article multiselect selectedRowKeys must be removed for multi select to perform correctly. Now I realize this is a simple example, but I find myself asking the same types of questions about dragging and dropping views into jdev or mapping bindings to pages so that I can gain access to data. I can relate to some angry posts by some about how difficult it is to develop anything useful in JDev and ADF because of a series of random problems (things like running OOM, or mapping bindings to a page which then for some reason map incorrectly or they think they are mapped to another page, etc...) Now I can already hear the first response... you are new to this world (yes) and you just need time. What if I told you I've been reading so much documentation over the past month that my eyes are bleeding. I've been through countless tutorials on how to use JDev and ADF. I've successfully created "Sample applications" generating useless tables of data. I've read several books on ADF and how to button click my way to creating EE applications, but I find the memorization of button clicking to be exhausting. I keep telling my boss I want to go back to writing code not dragging and dropping items on a page so that JDev can generate/modify .xml files for me.
Now that said I know I am new to this world and I'm trying to find some common ground as my job requires me to develop EE applications in ADF, and I must learn this technology. So I ask all of you ADF and JDev advocates prove me wrong here and point me to the documentation that all of you use to navigate this world of yours.
Thanks for your understand,
Wraith (Newbie and found wanting)
Edited by: wraith101 on Aug 14, 2012 3:38 PM
Edited by: wraith101 on Aug 14, 2012 3:42 PM

Answer 1

First off thank you for the response Shay!
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Getting used to the way you build applications with JDev and ADF takes time, but think how much time did it took you to learn Spring, JPA, ExtJS etc to a level where you knew every little setting you needed to manually code in a spring XML file, or JPQL query syntax in your JPA or a javascript in ExtJS - My guess was that getting to a situation where you know everything in those technology wasn't exactly a problem less experience.
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It is true it took some time to learn the technologies listed above. I guess If I were arguing for them I would say they were easier to use and learn due to most of them being open source and very popular because of this (i.e tons of examples, books, and documentation). Not sure if ADF is there yet?
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I do like the fact that I can get from 0 to a fully functional page with a few clicks here and there, and then fine tune the results with some property settings in various places.
And then if I need even further customization I can go to the code level when needed.
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I agree it takes very little time to create something that is at least visually usable. I'm not familiar enough ADF yet to determine now hard it is to actually create a fully functioning application that does more than display data. For example, how would I create a visualization that updates every 10 seconds and allows users to post feedback in a similar manner to this forum?
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The question of whether the declarative and visual development experience is a good thing or not is to some degree a matter of personal preferences.
I wonder how long would it have taken someone to build something like this: http://download.oracle.com/otn_hosted_doc/jdeveloper/11gdemos/ADF112/ADF112.html
with the stack you mentioned above. How many lines of code would they have needed to write, how many syntax errors while coding, and would the result be as functional so fast.
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Agree I'm not hear to argue which type of development experience is better or worse. I would point out however that as a JDev/ADF developer in order to develop in the technology it seems you must do most of your development within the JDev environment or have extensive experience in JSF (i.e know which xml files to edit and why I believe there is a reason JSF and JSP are seldom used IMHO because they are difficult. I understand JDev/ADF try to solve this problem) were as in other technologies you as the developer can choose the IDE etc. Another thing I noticed while watching the link you listed was the developer went from place to place to place within jdev making changes. As a newbie it seems that in order to develop ADF in JDev you must just "know things" (ie. for example he pulled in a method in to the task flow so he could invoke some validation or prereq check. As a developer how am I to know how and where and why I can/must do these things? ADF seems to be process based in order to achieve some goal, but the JDev framework gives no clues as to what you should/need to do next. As well as that I needed to create that method within my Application Module in order to do this, which by the way was not mentioned within this video.).
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We often see the reaction of "I don't get what all those XML files that JDev generate are doing" reaction from people who just start up with JDev and ADF.
But we do try and explain how everything is working in places like the ADF Insider Advanced seminars:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/learnmore/adfinsider-093342.html
I think the fact that there is a lot of documentation for ADF, and a lot of blog entries, how-to's etc on the web is actually a good thing.
I often find that if I run into an issue with ADF - a simple google search will show me how someone else solved that issue - and I like this too.
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I guess my biggest gripe here would be yes there is tons of JDev/ADF documentation on OTN and other places, but none of it is complete, and I would also argue that the organization on OTN is half hazard, and makes learning ADF difficult as well. I find myself drilling down through layers and layers of links only to not be able to get back to were I came from to look at another topic/tutorial I was interested in(maybe we need a ADF train to be added to the documentation wikis).
I would also argue when developing in other frameworks writing the xml is a big part to understanding how your application is tied together. For example, Spring servlet mapping or Spring injection mapping. When JDev does the mapping for me I feel that I know less and less about how my application works and I bet all the advanced ADF developers out there know quite a bit about how ADF xml mapping occurs and why, and I bet they make changes to these xml files manually quite often to get things to work as they desire?
I want to be clear here I am not trying to flaming here, just trying to make a difference for other developers like myself who come along and need to learn ADF to complete some task. Looking at the OTN site I believe creating documentation for ADF development appears to be a top priority, but due to the complexity of the framework there is just so much and it seems to be everywhere. My suggestion would be to include why we are doing such and such with in jdev approach instead of a drag this here to do this approach. For example, I'd like to see a tutorial where it explains when you drag this item in to the content window it creates this xml bind which is the same as what you would normally do in JSF like this (if anyone knows of such a tutorial plz link).
Again thanks for the reply, and I encourage others to give feedback and suggestions on how I too can become a better JDev/ADF developer.
-Wraith