A First Look at ADF Mobile

Posted on by

Just in case you missed it (and if you’re following this blog I’m sure you haven’t), the long awaited ADF Mobile was released a few weeks ago:

I finally found a few minutes to set up my first ADF mobile project and follow the tutorial that is posted on the [ADF Mobile] home page. I didn’t spend much more than 10 minutes setting up a project before I was able to deploy my first mobile app to the iOS emulator:

While I haven’t taken a deep dive into developing a “real” application yet (or deployed anywhere else but to the emulator included with XCode), I can note a few items:

  • ADF Mobile is not a replacement environment for doing mobile development, but something of a supplement to native development toolkits provided by Mobile OS vendors. You’ll still need some passing familiarity with mobile development concepts and environments, especially around the packaging and deployment of apps to your platform of choice. You’ll also need to install the software you would need for development on the native platform. For iOS, this means installing XCode on OS X.
  • A correction to the tutorial: the most recent version of XCode does not install the iOS SDKs to ‘/Developer’, but instead keeps them as part of the resources in the XCode.app installation. You won’t find this natively unless you select the “Show Package Contents” option in the right-click menu on OS X. JDeveloper, however, recognizes the XCode.app “application” as a folder. (Something to be aware of if you’re unfamiliar with OS X application packaging.)
  • To go along with that, you’ll also deploy your apps to actual devices using a developer key obtained from Apple’s Developer Program.
  • … and as exciting as all of this is, ADF Mobile apps are likely to be an ‘enterprise only’ development option as the ADF Mobile environment requires an active ADF license from Oracle. Good news for enterprises: you should be able to use ADF Mobile if you have an existing ADF license which is also included with WebLogic licensing as well. (Ask your friendly neighborhood Oracle sales rep for details.)

All in all, this is an exciting product for those of us who develop in the Oracle ecosphere – the approaches to ADF Mobile app development will be familiar to any developer with some working knowledge of JSF and/or ADF development.