To use Oracle ADF BC, you use wizards in JDeveloper to create:

• An Entity Object for each table - responsible for CRUD operations.
• A number of View Objects each pulling together information from one or more Entity Objects representing data views you need in your application.
• Application modules that map to use-cases in your application and expose the data model, service methods and transaction management operations.

These objects make up the middle tier components of your application. You can access ADF BC programatically with Java code, but the overall ADF framework also provide easy binding of JSF (ADF Faces Components), JSP and Swing (ADF Swing) based user interfaces to ADF BC using the ADF Model layer.you can build both web and Java client applications based on the same middle tier.

Beyond offering an object relational mapping and persistence solution, one unique aspect of ADF Business Components is the event driven approach it offers to coding. ADF BC objects contain hook points for you to inject your code to augment specific operations. Similar to the events offered by Oracle Forms for example, ADF BC offers methods you can easly overwrite to add your behavior. Examples include pre and post commit, DML execution, new record creation and more.


The ADF framework - of which ADF Business Components is a part - is free with the Oracle Application Server. You can deploy ADF middle tier components to other application servers than Oracle, but in that case you will have to license ADF separately (at the same cost per CPU as an Oracle Application Server Java Edition).

Pro
ADF is a complete, solid framework that Oracle has been building and improving for many years. Oracle is using it for Oracle Fusion Applications, ensuring focus on both usability for developers and performance for end users.

Con
If you are building a Java application using a database, there is no reason not to use Oracle ADF. The licensing cost is negligible ($5,000 per CPU for an Application Server Java Edition) compared with the time you would have to spend to build even a simple O-R mapping framework.