When building an ADF Faces application in JDeveloper, you might have noticed that in the Component Palette there is an option for both "Output Text" as well as "Output Text (Active)".   Why do we have both of these options?



Under the covers, there are actually two tags, af:outputText and af:activeOutputText.  Similarly, there is an active version of af:image, namely af:activeImage, and an active version of af:commandToolbarButton, af:activeCommandToolbarButton.

In the vast majority of cases, developers should use the non-active version of the components.   The active version of the components are there to support specific usecases around Server Side Push using the Active Data Service feature.  Most of our customers don't use Server Side Push, and hence do not need the active version of the components.  You can learn more about Server Side Push with ADF Active Data Service in this blog.

By using the active version of af:outputText, af:image or af:commandToolbarButton when you don't need to, you are taking a performance hit that is unnecessary.