Comparison between OAF and ADF

Many OAF developers who wants to learn ADF always have questions in their minds like , How ADF is different from OAF? How to deploy ADF pages in EBS ? What are the features available in ADF not in OAF ? Likewise there are so many question arises which keep on coming when you think of going for ADF and this particular post will help you in answering all those queries.

We have seen all EBS Customers, partners and system integrator's often develop extensions with the same technology stack (Forms or OA Framework) that the original E-Business Suite application was built with. This ensured that the extensions are fully compatible with the rest of the installed E-Business Suite applications.With the emergence of the next generation Fusion Middleware technology stack,especially the Application Development Framework, a common question from customers is whether to use OAF or ADF to develop their extensions.

OAF Technology is based on MVC architecture and its specifically designed for Oracle EBS applications. The OAF stack is comprised of underlying technologies like UIX and BC4J, that respectively form the core of the view and model layers. It includes Application Object Library (AOL) that provides common E-Business Suite artifacts such as menus, functions, messages, profiles, flexfields and attachments, and common services like function and data security. MDS is used for metadata management. 

ADF is a comprehensive, model-view-controller(MVC) technology stack that is oriented towards general-purpose application development which means its not specific to particular technologies . The ADF stack allows users to select among several choices of UI and business services technologies. The ADFstack is primarily comprised of ADF Faces (which is based on industry standard JSF technology), ADFm (m for model - the data control layer that implementsJSR-227) and ADFbc (bc for business components – formerly BC4J).Early releases of ADF contained UIX. Oracle then developed the ADF Faces set of components, based on UIX functionality, but conforming to the JSF standard. The ADF Faces components now replace UIX as the preferred view technology for ADF applications.

In adf you can design the page layout using drag and drop feature and even you can view the page by switching it browser mode , Unlike OAF where you need to run page to check out how layout looks like. 

I have listed out the differences between OAF and ADF  , Look the table below.

	OAF	ADF
MVC Stack
View	View UIX + EBS-specific extensions	ADF Faces
Model	BC4J + EBS-specific extensions	ADFm + ADFbc (BC4J)
Controller	OAF Controller	JSF Controller
Choice of alternate view or model	No	Yes
Technology Layers
MDS	Yes	Yes
JDeveloper	Yes	Yes
AOL	Yes	No
Industry Standards
JSF	No	Yes
JSR-227	No	Yes
WSRP 1.0	Yes	Yes
JSR-168	Yes	Yes
UI Features
Look and Feel	Swan look and feel	Oracle Desktop /Browser look and feel(BLAF)
Rich Client Interface	No	No
Auto-detection of partial page refresh target	Yes	No
List of Values –validation, autocomplete,auto-clear	Yes	No
Business Layer
Exposing BC4J  components as webservices	Yes	Yes
PL/SQL DML operation support	Yes	Yes
WHO column support	Yes	No
Session Management
E-Business Suite Session management	Yes	No
Design Time
Drag/Drop data	No	Yes
controls	No	Yes
Workflow
BPEL integration	No	Yes
Oracle Workflow integration	Yes	No
EBS-specific Artifacts
Profiles	Yes	No
Flexfields	Yes	No

In conclusion, there are three main situations and corresponding recommendations for building your custom extensions to the E-Business Suite:

1. If you want to integrate your extensions tightly with the E-Business Suite, you should use the OAF Release 12 technology stack, which includes the use of JDeveloper 10g and ADF BC (or use OAF Release 11i, which uses JDeveloper 9i).


2. If you are building a separate application that does not need to integrate at all with the E-Business Suite, and you need an AJAX-style rich client user interface, you should use ADF 11g.

Note : Oracle has released SDK to use functionality of ADF in OAF , With the use of SDK you can add functionalities of ADF into OAF page