1 Introduction to the Oracle ADF Toy Store Application Case Study

This chapter contains the following sections:

Section 1.1, "Introduction"
Section 1.2, "For More Information"

1.1 Introduction

The Oracle ADF Toy Store application is a realistic web store application which consists of over twenty web pages to enable the end user to browse and purchase from a catalog of toys online. Like any web store application, the Oracle ADF Toy Store application includes functionality to manage user accounts, display product details, search the database, manage the shopping cart, and transact purchases. Technically, the application design adheres to the Model/View/Controller (MVC) design pattern and is implemented using these existing J2EE application frameworks:

As with all MVC-style web applications, Oracle ADF Toy Store has the basic architecture illustrated in Figure 1-1, "The Model-View-Control Architecture".

Figure 1-1 The Model-View-Control Architecture

This image shows the model-view-controller architecture.

The model layer represents the business information needed by the application.
The controller layer handles user input, interacts with the model layer, and picks the presentation.
The view layer presents the model data to the end user.

The goal of this case study is to show in detail the framework-based implementation of the Oracle ADF Toy Store sample application. We will focus primarily on the controller and view layer technologies. We will explore the Struts and Oracle ADF frameworks in tandem to understand how they simplify implementing the view and controller layers. In the process, we'll also examine ways to use Oracle JDeveloper 10g productively to build these kinds of MVC-style business applications.

1.2 For More Information

Business logic developers responsible for coding the business object layer will want to refer to the Oracle ADF Toy Store technical whitepaper that is a companion document to this case study. The model layer consists of one or more business services that expose application functionality and access to model data through a business service interface. These business services, in turn, rely on query components to retrieve that data and on business objects to validate and persist any new or modified data.

In the Oracle ADF Toy Store application, business objects are implemented with Oracle ADF Business Components, a framework within Oracle ADF that supports business logic development. In this case study, we encounter examples of the interaction between the model and controller layers, but an in-depth discussion of the benefits of working with Oracle ADF Business Components is beyond the scope of this study.

To view the technical whitepaper, see the Welcome to the Oracle ADF Toy Store Application page on Oracle Technology Network. In particular, the section "Implementing the Model Layer Using Oracle ADF Business Components" will be of interest. The whitepaper provides in-depth descriptions of the benefits of ADF Business Components. The whitepaper also describes in detail parts of the Oracle ADF Toy Store application not addressed by this case study.

Note:

In contrast to the companion technical whitepaper, this case study provides detailed descriptions of individual Toy Store application web pages and describes how page flow is managed. We will see exactly how Oracle ADF integrates with the view and controller layers, and how web page designers benefit from Oracle ADF data binding technology and Struts to produce clean, easy-to-understand JSP pages, free of complex business logic and unnecessary scriptlet code.

Before diving into the explanation of the application, let's make sure you can open and run the application in JDeveloper 10g. The next chapter details the steps to get the Toy Store application set up correctly on your system.