At Oracle OpenWorld this year I did a session about the future of Oracle ADF, and one of the demos I did there was showing the powerful combination of Oracle ADF backend with a new Oracle JET UI layer and how Oracle Visual Builder makes this integration very simple.
While we have many happy Oracle ADF customers, we do hear from some of them about new UI requirements that might justify thinking about adopting a new UI architecture for some modules. These type of requirements align with an industry trend towards adopting a more client centric UI architecture that leverages the power of JavaScript on the client. While ADF (which is more of a server centric architecture) does let you leverage JavaScript on the client and provides hook points for that in ADF Faces, some customers prefer a more "puristic" approach for new user interfaces that they are planning to build. Oracle's solution for such a UI architecture is based on Oracle JET - an open source set of libraries we developed and share with the community at http://oraclejet.org.
Oracle Visual Builder provides developers with a simpler approach to building Oracle JET based UIs - for both web and on-device mobile applications. Focusing on a visual UI design approach it drastically reduce the amount of manual coding you need to do to create JET based UIs.
UIs that you build in Visual Builder connect at the back to REST services, and this is where you can leverage Oracle ADF. In version 12 of JDeveloper we introduced the ability to publish ADF Business Components as REST services through a simple wizard. Note that out-of-the-box you get a very powerful set of services that support things like query by example, pagination, sorting and more. If you haven't explored this functionality already, check out the videos showing how to do it here, and this video covering cloud hosting these services.
Once you have this ADF based REST services layer - you'll be glad to hear that in Visual Builder we have specific support to simplify consuming these REST services. Specifically - we understand the meta-data descriptions that these REST services provide and then are able to create services and endpoints mapping for you.
You leverage our "Service from specification" dialog to add your ADF services to your Visual Builder app - and from that point on, it's quite simple to build new JET UIs accessing the data.
In the video below I show how simple it is to build a JET-based on-device mobile app that leverage a set of REST services that were created from Oracle JDeveloper 12. Check it out: