JHeadstart

Oracle JHeadstart 10g and OraFormsFaces have joined forces. Both the JHeadstart team and Commit Consulting concluded that the two products are very complementary. The upcoming version of both products will make it possible to generate ADF Faces pages that embed Oracle Forms using OraFormsFaces straight from JHeadstart 10g. This feature will be introduced in the upcoming version 10.1.3.3 of JHeadstart and the upcoming version 2.3 of OraFormsFaces.

What is Oracle JHeadstart?

Oracle JHeadstart 10g for ADF dramatically improves developer’s productivity for the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF). By declaratively specifying your application through highly functional meta data, using simple property editors, and using the JHeadstart Application Generator, JHeadstart generates fully functional applications based on Oracle ADF. Amongst others it generates features like multi-row editing, trees, (multi-select) list of values, quick and advanced search wizards, and shuttles based on simple meta data. It does not generate Java! It generates UI pages, configures the page flow and wires together the pages, the page flow, and the business components. It allows IT organizations to rapidly introduce J2EE, without the need for a team of J2EE gurus to build complex transactional J2EE applications. The 10.1.3 release fully supports the JavaServer Faces standard.

The declarative nature of this approach allows you to migrate your Oracle Forms to Java/HTML, thereby protecting your investments when moving to J2EE. Oracle JHeadstart is seamlessly integrated in the Oracle JDeveloper IDE.

What is the synergy?

Oracle JHeadstart is used to build new ADF Faces applications. It generates you application from highly functional metadata. With the upcoming version 10.1.3.3 of JHeadstart it will be possible to specify in this metadata that you want to embed an existing Oracle Form using OraFormsFaces. When generating the application from JHeadstart you will get a trully hybrid application that consists of pure ADF Faces pages generated by JHeadstart and ADF Faces pages that embed Oracle Forms but also generated straight from JHeadstart. JHeadstart will generate all the necessary navigation logic between the pages.

This can be a great combination for a gradual migration from Oracle Forms to ADF Faces. You can start of with a JHeadstart generated application that largly consists of existing Oracle Forms modules using OraFormsFaces. Then graduately you can replace individual pages that embed Oracle Forms with true ADF Faces pages than can just as easily be configured and generated from JHeadstart.

The upcoming versions of JHeadstart will even include a feature to analyze you existing Oracle Forms modules and generate the necessary ADF Business Components and JHeadstart metadata to then generate ADF Faces pages with similar functionality as the old Oracle Forms.

Combining Oracle JHeadstart and OraFormsFaces gives you an extremely smooth and gradual path to migrate from Oracle Forms to ADF Faces. If you want to migrate from Oracle Forms to ADF Faces do it at a pace that makes sense to your business, as there is no need for any big-bang rewrite or conversion.

How to get it

Soon it will be very easy to get going with a combination of Oracle JHeadstart and OraFormsFaces. All you need to do is download both products.b A few enhancements have been made to OraFormsFaces to make generation from JHeadstart as easy as possible. These enhancements will be in version 2.3 of OraFormsFaces which is soon to be released. Once this version is available, you can go to the trial download page and download a fully functional trial version.

For Oracle JHeadstart you’ll need at least version 10.1.3.3. This version is soon to be released. It will probably be available first to existing JHeadstart customers with a valid supplement option. The current JHeadstart public evaluation version on OTN is version 10.1.3.2 which doesn’t have the OraFormsFaces support yet. As soon as the new version of JHeadstart is available for public evaluation this page will be updated.

Once you have downloaded both OraFormsFaces v2.3 and JHeadstart v10.1.3.3 you can follow the installation instructions for both products.