During Oracle Open World 2012 the ADF Product Management team announced a new OTN website, the ADF Architecture Square.  While OOW represents a great opportunity to let customers know about new and exciting developments, the problem with making announcements during OOW however is customers are bombarded with so many messages that it's easy to miss something important.

So in this blog post I'd like to highlight as part of the ADF Architecture Square website, one of the initial core offerings is a new document entitled ADF Code Guidelines.

Now the title of this document should hopefully make it obvious what the document contains, but what's the purpose of the document, why did Oracle create it?

Personally having worked as an ADF consultant before joining Oracle, one thing I noted amongst ADF customers who had successfully deployed production systems, that they all approached software development in a professional and engineered way, and all of these customers had their own guideline documents on ADF best practices, conventions and recommendations.  These documents designed to be consumed by their own staff to ensure ADF applications were "built right", typically sourced their guidelines from their team's own expert learnings, and the huge amount of ADF technical collateral that is publicly available.  Maybe from manuals and whitepapers, presentations and blog posts, some written by Oracle and some written by independent sources.

Now this is all good and well for the teams that have gone through this effort, gathering all the information and putting it into structured documents, kudos to them.  But for new customers who want to break into the ADF space, who have project pressures to deliver ADF solutions without necessarily working on assembling best practices, creating such a document is understandably (regrettably?) a low priority. 

So in recognising this hurdle, at Oracle we've devised the ADF Code Guidelines.  This document sets out ADF code guidelines, practices and conventions for applications built using ADF Business Components and ADF Faces Rich Client (release 11g and greater).  The guidelines are summarized from a number of Oracle documents and other 3rd party collateral, with the goal of giving developers and development teams a short circuit on producing their own best practices collateral.

The document is not a final production, but a living document that will be extended to cover new information as discovered or as the ADF framework changes.

Readers are encouraged to discuss the guidelines on the ADF EMG and provide constructive feedback to me (Chris Muir) via the ADF EMG Issue Tracker.

We hope you'll find the ADF Code Guidelines useful and look forward to providing updates in the near future.

Image courtesy of paytai / FreeDigitalPhotos.net