ADF Essentials - The Bare Necessities

Look for the bare necessities
The simple bare necessities
Forget about your worries and your strife
I mean the bare necessities
Old Mother Nature's recipes
That brings the bare necessities of life
 - "The Jungle Book" Soundtrack: "The Bare Necessities" by Phil Harris and Bruce Reitherman

Since OpenWorld 12 wrapped up, I've spent some time experimenting with ADF Essentials.  I like it quite a bit, for the following reasons:

1. It's FREE.  Remains FREE, even after you deploy applications into a production environment.  Yup, that's right...FREE.
2. My Windows OS, which is a VM running on my 2010 White MacBook, is much happier about running ADF Essentials than it was about full-bore ADF.
3. I can write apps for deployment to any industry-standard compliant tech stack, rather than sticking strictly with Oracle technology.  So far, I've done deployed via GlassFish.  I now have JBoss and Apache in my sights (although, admittedly, the Apache server is on top of Oracle's MySQL database).  I should note here that I'm wandering outside the boundaries a bit with JBoss and Apache - ADF Essentials is support for WebLogic 11g, Glassfish 3.1, and WebSphere 7.  I'm interested in seeing what else it can do...
4. ADF Essentials expands my options in the market place.  Let me explain that a bit.  In my case, ADF has always been about productivity.  Although I'm out of practice and far-less-then-average when it comes to writing good code (in truth, I hire somebody to do that for me when I have to), the speed and ease of ADF has really ramped up my ability to develop good apps quickly. And, because ADF developers can run circles around traditional programmers in terms of productivity, ADF developers command higher rates in the marketplace.  Even I benefit from that.  And now, with ADF Essentials, I have that same economic advantage with potential customers who don't use the Oracle technology stack.

Now, I'll admit it's not all nirvana.  ADF Essentials doesn't include the ADF Security Framework, so you're on your own for security.  Nor do you get Web Service Data Control...back to a proxy client class type of solution.  I've personally skinned the cat on the latter issue, but not on the former (some homework to do on that point).

What you do get are the following ADF components - the "bare necessities", if you will:

1. ADF Faces Rich Client Components
2. ADF Controller
3. ADF Model
4. ADF Business Components

Bottom line:  so far, I'm digging development with the "bare necessities" of ADF Essentials.  Simple. Clean.  Very useful.  I'll keep you posted as things progress.  In the meantime, have thoughts or opinions of your own?  Comments welcome.