4.1 Introduction to ADF Faces

Oracle ADF Faces is a 100% JavaServer Faces (JSF) compliant component library that offers a broad set of enhanced UI components for JSF application development. Based on the JSF JSR 127 specification, ADF Faces components can be used in any IDE that supports JSF. More specifically, ADF Faces works with Sun's JSF Reference Implementation 1.1_01 (or later) and Apache MyFaces 1.0.8 (or later).

ADF Faces ensures a consistent look and feel for your application, allowing you to focus more on user interface interaction than look and feel compliance. The components support multi–language and translation implementation as well as accessibility features.

The ADF Faces component library also supports multiple render kits for HTML, mobile, PDA, and telnet users. For delivering more powerful and interactive clients along the lines of Rich Internet Applications, a render kit based on a combination of JavaScript, XML and DOM (also known as Ajax) will be provided in the future.

ADF Faces has many of the framework and component features most needed by JSF developers today, including:

Client-side conversion and validation
A process scope that makes it easier to pass values from one page to another
A hybrid state-saving strategy that provides more efficient client-side state saving
Built-in support for label and message display in all input components
Built-in accessibility support in components
Support for custom skins
Support for mobile applications

ADF Faces UI components include advanced tables with column sorting and row selection capability, tree components for displaying data hierarchically, color and date pickers, and a host of other components such as menus, command buttons, shuttle choosers, and progress meters.

ADF Faces out-of the-box components simplify user interaction, such as the input file component for uploading files, and the select input components with built-in dialog support for navigating to secondary windows and returning to the originating page with the selected values.

For more information about ADF Faces, refer to the following resources:

ADF Faces Core tags at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/partners/addins/exchange/jsf/doc/tagdoc/core/index.html
ADF Faces HTML tags at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/partners/addins/exchange/jsf/doc/tagdoc/html/index.html
ADF Faces Javadocs at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/partners/addins/exchange/jsf/doc/apidocs/index.html
ADF Faces developer's guide at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/htdocs/partners/addins/exchange/jsf/doc/devguide/index.html

When you create JSF JSP pages that use ADF Faces components for the UI and use JSF technology for page navigation, you can obtain the advantages of the Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) by using the ADF Model binding capabilities for the components in the pages. For information about data controls and the ADF Model, see Section 1.2, "Development Process with Oracle ADF and JavaServer Faces".

Table 4-1 shows the platforms currently supported for ADF Faces.

Table 4-1 Supported Platforms for ADF Faces

User Agent	Windows	Mac OS X	Red Hat Linux	Windows Mobile	Palm OS
Internet Explorer	6.0 *			2003+
Mozilla	1.7.x		1.7.x
Firefox	1.0.x		1.0.x
Safari		1.3, 2.0 **
WebPro (Mobile)					3.0

* Accessibility and BiDi is only supported on IE on Windows.

** Apple bug fixes provided in Safari 1.3 patch 312.2 and Safari 2.0 patch 412.5 required.

Tip:

On a UNIX server box, button images may not render as expected. Assuming you're using JDK 1.4 or later, Oracle strongly recommend using -Djava.awt.headless=true as a command-line option with UNIX boxes.

Read this chapter to understand:

How to create a workspace using an application template in JDeveloper
What files are created for you in the view project when you add a JSF page and insert UI components
How to use panel and layout components to create page layouts
What JDeveloper does for you when you work with backing beans