ADF Business Components thru RMI Vs EJB and Toplink

Question

I was wondering what the differences would be in implementing remote business logic. Currently we are planning on using ADF to develop front-end web apps (moving from Struts). We were wondering what the differences between the front end calling EJBs using Toplink vs ADF Business Components thru RMI in terms of scalability as the migration from Struts to ADF will also encompass PL/SQL and Oracle Forms, thus increasing the user count drastically.

Answer 1

I'm going through a similar situation right now. I'm am not an expert, but here what I've gathered from my experience. Whether EJB's using Toplink or ADF scales better depends quite a bit on the particulars of your situation. In some cases one might be better than the other, but I get the feeling that they are both pretty good solutions.

However since you mention that the project also involves the migration of Oracle Forms, then it seems that ADF would be the best choice since Oracle seems to be positioning JDeveloper and ADF as the successor for Forms and Reports (see the ADF Documentation targeting Forms and Designer Developers).

Answer 2

ADF is pretty broad, as it encompasses front end all the way down through data access. It's a great RAD framework if you are going to use the entire stack, but isn't so hot if you are only going to use one portion or the other.

I am assuming you are talking about using either toplink or ADF business components (BC4J) for the data access layer.

I would say that if you are planning on using an RMI based application, that Toplink would probably be better, mainly because the power of BC4J is in its view objects, which don't serialize (Hence translating those results into toplink style value objects, anyway).

If you are doing a straight up and down web-app and dont really care about EJB's and RMI then i think you'll find that BC4J offers a lot in the way of making standard web apps scale... long story short it maps sql into view objects, which are basically smart datagrids that have very tunable behavior... which can be bound directly to JSF components of the Oracle ADF Faces, giving really good seamless RAD.

Answer 3

You should not use the ejb deployment of adf bc. It needs a lot of rmi synchronisation. I used it with adf swing. Going to the next record takes about 3 seconds. We need to rewrite the comboboxes to make it perform.

In 11g ( 2009 may edition) you will get the option to create a sdo ws based on a viewobject and you can use these in adf bc serviced based entities in a other adf project.