Saying that enterprise Java is too complicated/convoluted is just as bad as saying that APEX is too simplistic. But developers seem to get into these religious debates all the time.

That’s why the developers in my company have all their implementation choices reviewed before they start on any project. Seldom are they ever objective about tools, and often they pick the wrong one for any particular job.

IMHO, forms/reports/PL/SQL developers have about as much chance of moving to any enterprise OO platform like JEE or .Net as VB6 developers have of moving to C#. But… Oracle is sure trying to make it look easy with wizard based proprietary solutions!

MVC is actually way older than the Gang of Four’s writing, and harks back to the days of Xerox Labs in the late ’70s. It took prominence in SmallTalk, but certainly became very popular with the Gang of Fours Design Patterns book published in mid ’90s.

MVC supplies many benefits, just too many to go into. Best to read the book I guess.

You’re right that naturally
good traditional Oracle Forms programmers leaned towards MVC style programming. Did they have a name for it though? I never met a Forms programmer who said MVC to me. And did you ever work on a Forms project where the programmers hadn’t done this? I’m sure the answer is yes because on a number of Forms sites I encountered horrible messes where the programmers has sprayed code in the db and Forms. Great way as a consultant to make money fixing problems, horrible for the maintenance and ongoing cost & complexity of the system.

Whether the logic should “all” go in the db or midtier is a separate discussion and has been argued strongly elsewhere on the internet already. I’m not going to argue either, but Paul Dorsey who is an advocate of the db and JDeveloper argues all in the database as per his discussion here. I’ll leave you and the readers to decide what is best, I’d rather only start 1 major debate a week

Leading on from MVC though, your comment “Good software architecture has nothing to do with a development language or platform”. Strong words and incorrect. A good language/platform can help promote good software architecture, because the architecture is built in. JDev’s ADF BC/Faces (a’la MVC) approach forces the programmer to become aware of the division and give it credence. The whole Ruby on Rails framework is built on MVC, and so was SmallTalk. But I think what you meant to say and I’ll agree with, regardless of the language/platform, it is always possible for programmers to make a mess of it.

I will also agree with you that the traditional Java guys did seem to get things massively wrong by putting a h3ll of a lot of the business and data processing logic in the mid-tier. Q: Did it perform A: Nup. As was “rediscovered” by the Java crew, databases are just a tad better at processing data, something about 20 years of optimisation built in I believe.

That’s what’s really cool about the JDev approach though, where I, as a traditional PLSQL programmer, can still put the logic that needs to go in the database in PLSQL modules, and via the ADF midtier make calls to it. Neither my SQL or PLSQL skills are withering because I can still work with that handy old Oracle database. But at the same time I can leverage all those Java APIs that provide so much extra functionality.

(And before you argue that the same functionality is available in the db via PLSQL modules, my recent experience with the new added packages in the db is they are wrappers on the Java equivalent)

Finally I’ll pick you up on the last paragraph and I’ll speak anecodetally. When writing a JDev solution with ADF (not necessarily a vanilla Java solution as such), do I focus on the business problem or the technical solution? With the older versions of JDev, particular 10.1.2 and earlier that utilised UIX, definitely the technical and it was frustrating. However with 10.1.3, the delight has been the ability to focus on the business problem. Not to say there aren’t technical problems, but these days I’m enjoying writing requirement specs and design specs that I know I can implement in JDev’s ADF rather than tearing my hair out.

Final final note (I promise), Patrick as noted on one of my other posts, I’m willing to take this whole discussion off board and write a blog post with input from us all, with the goal of writing something that is a tad more clear than the comments sprayed across the several blogs & forums. Please feel free to join me and others in this discussion be emailing subs/@/ccmlabz/net. My feeling is there are other Oracle programmers out there still sitting on the fence who would like to make an informed choice based on our experiences, and not just the Oracle marketing collateral.

Thanks for taking timeout with the followup post. It’s been great reading the Oracle blogs more recently for a healthy debate.

Regards,

CM.

Is a hammer better than a screwdriver? I’m not sure, depends on what you want to achieve!