Thursday, December 06, 2012

ADF Essentials on Tomcat

I wrote the other day that I was doing some cool tech stuff, and I promised to update ya'all on my progress. Well, here we go.

As a non-techie functional type, I'm rather proud of myself from successful bringing up Oracle ADF Essentials on an Apache Tomcat web server and MySQL database.  And I must give kudos here to Oracle Brazil's Raphael Rodrigues, who laid out a great set of instructions here.

I've tested this configuration out on various operating systems:  Linux (Oracle, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu), Unix (OpenSolaris), Windows (XP, 7) and even...gulp...Apple's Mountain Lion (which is really Unix BeOS with some snazzy development thrown into the mix).  All worked on my test beds.

Now, why would I go through all the trouble of doing this?  Well, there are a few reasons:

1.  As an E-Business User, I now have the opportunity to build ADF Rich Faces - based customizations in EBS 12.1.3 and externalize those customizations.  In fact, I can even persistently externalize any data attribute customizations involved in those customizations in MySQL.  And, if I'm really at the top of my game, I can use SOAP or REST integration to loosely-couple those integrations with EBS so the customizations survive any upgrades. Wow, maybe I can even get this to integrate with SaaS-based applications somewhere down the line?

2. Ditto for Fusion Applications.

3. Ditto for existing data warehouses.

4. Just as important as items 1-3 here...it was educational and fun!!!

More coming, as this is just the first increment in a much larger project.  Questions? Thoughts? Jump on the comments.

6 comments:

MilesT said...

Do you see ADF essentials as an alternative to APEX?

Unknown said...

Hello

Interesting experiment and blog.

Why did you choice apache-tomcat instead Glassfish server?

Thanks.
Jose A. Rodriguez

Anonymous said...

How about documenting what you did to configure ADF essentials and share it with us? Thanks in advance.

fteter said...

@MilesT: Possibly, but it's not how I use them. Love APEX. When I need simple, quick, lightweight solutions, APEX is my tool of choice. ADF Essentials is my tool for more complex and high-risk (i.e., highly integrated) solutions. ADF Essentials is also my tool of choice for building solutions that are "technology stack agnostic".

fteter said...

@Jose: Thanks! Chose Apache-Tomcat at the time simply because I saw more production environments running on Tomcat than on Glassfish. Since the article, I've been diving deeper into ADF Essentials with Glassfish and JBoss...very happy with the results.

fteter said...

@Anonymous: I'll happily do that. Probably an early 2013 blog post, as I'd like to include instructions for Glassfish and other tested servers as well.