Oracle plans to make its ADF (Application Development Framework) technology available to software developers who use the Eclipse IDE, thus providing them with productivity benefits, an Oracle official said on Wednesday.
The company will add ADF design time capabilities to its Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, which plugs into the Eclipse IDE and is geared to application development for the Oracle WebLogic Server Java application server, said Ted Farrell, Oracle chief architect and senior vice president.
Oracle customers, Farrell said, abound in Eclipse shops. "They really want to take advantage of the benefits of ADF in Eclipse," said Farrell, at the Oracle Develop conference in San Francisco. Although he did not have a specific arrival date for the ADF capabilities, Farrell said new releases of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse are offered every three months, which should result in early versions of the ADF product perhaps sooner than what otherwise might be expected.
Based on JavaServer Faces user interface development technology, ADF is a declarative productivity framework that enables developers to abstract themselves from nuances of underlying technologies such as Adobe Flash or AJAX, Farrell said. "So when those technologies change, [developers] won't have to go back and rebuild their pages. We'll just update the ADF framework and they'll pick up the changes from us."
"The whole idea [behind ADF] is productivity," Farrell said.
Oracle also hopes to soon offer a production-stage mobile client for ADF, which will let ADF applications run natively on Rim Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices. Oddly, Oracle also plans to have an ADF client for Google's Android mobile platform. Ironically, Oracle is suing Google over Android, alleging violation of Java patents. Farrell declined to comment on the lawsuit.