When Oracle ADF Mobile was released over 3 years ago, one of the first blogs I created on this topic showed how to leverage Oracle ADF Business Components to access a server database and create a mobile front end on top of it.
Since then both frameworks have matured, and we learned some best practices doing implementations internally and for customers. Today I'm going to show you a better way to build this type of applications, specifically leveraging REST as the communication protocol between the ADF backend and the Oracle MAF front end. REST based integration performs much better than SOAP for this mobile scenario, and as you'll see development is as simple.
Specifically I'm leveraging the Oracle A-Team Mobile Persistence Accelerator (AMPA) JDeveloper Extension- this extension simplifies MAF's interacting with REST backends, and has some cool extra features if your REST services are based on ADF BC.
I used JDeveloper 12.2.1 to expose REST services from my ADF Business Components. If you are not familiar with how to do that, see this blog on exposing ADF BC as REST services, and then this blog about enabling CORS for ADF Business Components.
The video below picks up the same application (Application14) and continues from where the previous two ended.
Now let's see the MAF development part:
As you can see, it is quite easy to create your MAF UI. The AMPA extension does a lot of work for you making the access to the REST backend as easy as possible. (thanks goes out to Steven Davelaar).
The AMPA extension can also generate a complete UI for you - so you can give that wizard a try to if you are looking for even more productivity.
