Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service (ABCS)

Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service (ABCS)

This week at Open World the Application Builder Cloud Service was announced, https://cloud.oracle.com/ApplicationBuilder. A simple “development” tool to create your own custom apps for web or mobile based on SAAS REST services. Oracle Sales Cloud already provides you some REST services to use, but ERP Cloud has none to date.

The end-user can create his own page in a few clicks, for example to show opportunities with or without child related objects. But it’s also possible that you want to add additional information, not available in Sales Cloud, like tickets related to your opportunities. You can easily define custom objects, which are stored in the 2-4GB database that you get with ABCS.

Oracle is also working on a connection to your own custom local database or the Database Cloud Service though. At this moment your custom objects would only be available in your local app and not cross apps.

ABCS provides you the choice between standard Cloud Application layout or Alta UI. ABCS is based on Javascript and the Javascript Extensibility Toolkit (JET), http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jet/overview/index.html.

Oracle JET
Oracle JET is a Javascript Development Framework which was used by Oracle internally in the last 2 years to build the Cloud Service solutions and contains stuff like JQuery for the UI Components and other available popular components.
Of course other popular frameworks are already out there like AngularJS, Backbone, Ember, Meteor, etc.

Oracle JET is also available to Oracle customers using Cloud Services under Restricted Use License mainly to connect to existing SAAS REST Services.
Next step is that JET will be released as open source.

So how do these products compare to ADF?

ABCS is aimed at the Citizen Developer, the business user, who can easily create his own app based on the SAAS services, without help of IT. It allows for very simple validations, but any complex validations and navigation should be handled by Javascript, which can be provided for example with JET.
You can export your ABCS application and customize it further in JET (but you cannot import it back again).

So ABCS is a very nice intuitive tool to create custom pages quickly, also for mobile, but it’s not a development tool as such.

ABCS is dus een hele mooie intuïtieve tool waar je snel maatwerk pagina’s mee kunt maken, ook voor mobiel, maar het is niet een development tool voor developers en het is niet bedoeld voor complexe applicaties.

Oracle JET is aimed at the Javascript Developer, while Oracle ADF aims at the Java Developer. JET is also code centric, while ADF works more in a declarative way using Metadata Services (MDS), where you build your UI with some kind of composer.

Oracle JET is a client-side toolkit and ADF is aserver framework. Oracle JET only allows for REST webservices, where ADF supports much more type of connections including SOAP, REST services and direct binding.

In Oracle JET you can copy code snippets (HTML, Javascript) from the JET Cookbook (for example from the Knockout Framework) and paste it in your HTML template in any IDE (Netbeans for example) and build your page quickly using code only.

In short some considerations to use ADF or JET(see also http://docs.oracle.com/middleware/jet112/jet/developer/GUID-FEB54E3B-DC3E-452E-9BD7-C40C71F790D6.htm#JETDG22):

Requirement	Oracle ADF or JET?	Feature
Extensible UI through in-place editing or some form of composer	Oracle ADF	Declarative programming model based on Metadata Services (MDS)
Upgrade safety for an enterprise application	Oracle ADF	Metadata and API upgradability for base code and extensions
Declarative navigation and/or reusable task flows	Oracle ADF	Task Flows
Multiple Fusion Middleware (FMW) Suite products	Oracle ADF	Federated regions and task flows
Integrate with Fusion Applications (FA)	Oracle ADF	Services for complying with FA navigation, state sharing, and so on
Desktop integration with Microsoft Excel	Oracle ADF	Microsoft Excel front ends
Insulation from technology shifts	Oracle ADF	Guaranteed support for upgrades
Embed UI in a page built with third-party technology	Oracle JET	Fully client-side rendered component set and framework that doesn't assume page ownership
Single page application	Oracle JET	URL routing and browser history management for navigating within a single page
Standalone component set that can be integrated in a third-party framework	Oracle JET	Wrapped as independent client-side rendered jQuery UI components

Below yoou see some examples of what was shown on Open World for the Work Better app as promotion of Alta UI. The first is developed using ADF Faces, where the second was with JET. As you can see you can’t see much difference in layout, but that’s because they are both based on the same UI components, which come from the JET framework underneath.

So in short, Application Builder Cloud Service might be a nice way for the Citizen Developer to create his own app, Oracle JET for smaller cloud based applications based on REST webservices and where your development team focuses on Javascript. If your development team focuses on Java and you need a server side application with much data access, you may focus on ADF.