Oracle ADF

There’s a point in every consultant’s professional life where he or she has to make a decision, take a stand. And while it’s not food security, prison reform, or world peace, starting with Oracle ADF is at least one place to start. We don’t support it, try not to take gigs that work with it, and ultimately would like you to do the same.

For the last six months I’ve received at least one recruiter call a week asking if we’re interested in a “very exciting” opportunity to work with Oracle ADF reasonably near us. Then they sweeten it by saying it’s for a large consulting operation (but actually for a contractor to said large consulting group). And then to make it even more attractive it’s for the Federal government. The most recent recruiter got way more than she was expecting… and I was surprised also by my forcefulness re ADF. So I felt I should write it down more rationally for future reference.

The bottom line is that every job I’ve worked with ADF has been at best an “intro to J2EE or EE5” programming class best suited for a community college evening class setting, not for professional work. We build something up and so long as the layout is super simple and easy to modify fonts and colours, everything stays together. But the kit falls apart the very first time things need to be really understood, taken apart.

This isn’t a bash against the corporate developers. It’s just they are usually neither interested in nor passionate about developing large code bases with complex dependency management. These hard-working souls are Microsoft .NET programmers at heart and really just want to build the thing in VB.NET. And they’re right to think that way. I’m not beating up on .NET developers here. I know a number of places that run very smoothly, very well indeed on Visual Studio-written code. These people couldn’t build code from the command line if their very lives depended on it… and they are still wonderfully productive and successful.

I think the developers are generally split into two camps (I know… not an original thought): those who want to understand the stack deeply and those see the stack as a distraction to the “real work”. I do not think either camp is wrong. Oracle’s ADF is a stack that competes directly with .NET, not stacks like Ruby on Rails, Grails, or Meteor. Which begs the question why not just use .NET? You can’t swing a dead cat around a user’s group meeting without hitting a .NET programmer. Oracle ADF folks? Federal, state, and local government developers mostly (read: $$$$). The U.S. Government seems to love Oracle ADF (I’m looking at you, Department of Interior) which should immediately tell you at least something.

There’s also an open-source issue in all of this, but again it comes down to FOSS offerings such as RoR, Grails, JS-based stacks v. closed-source goods such as Oracle ADF and .NET-based frameworks. Which goes back to the main point. Use .NET if you insist on closed-source. You’ll be happier and have less to “explain up the chain” as to why your project is so mugged.