ADF Essentials - Quick Technical Review

Finally we have express ADF edition - ADF Essentials, free to use even for production deployment. It includes most of the important ADF features, except ADF Security (this can be implemented with standard Java security). We were discussing idea of express ADF edition on ACE Directors briefings already two years back and Sten Vesterli was one of the strongest advocates for ADF Essentials.

There is lots of hype about free ADF edition, but only time will show how successful it will be. Currently most of the Oracle customers already have WebLogic licenses, so it makes more sense to use full ADF version and avoid sometimes painful ADF setup, configuration and runtime performance monitoring for serious production systems. On the other hand, lighter ADF edition also makes its own sense - we can have much more ADF deployments across enterprise with lower cost.

This post is just a quick review for ADF Essentials on Glassfish. I will do proper performance test soon to compare ADF performance on WebLogic vs. Glassfish. So far, it seems like runtime ADF performance on Glassfish is pretty good, may be because lighter server. I will need to verify how good it scales and how well it works under stress load.

Download sample application for this post - adfessentialstest.zip. This application contains two JDeveloper 11.1.2.3 applications - one main application, another ADF library. I would like to test if ADF region imported from ADF library works. Sample application was deployed to Glassfish server based on instructions from Shay Schmeltzer - Deploying Oracle ADF Essentials Applications to Glassfish.

Main application is up and running on Glassfish server:

There is ADF Library JAR file included into Main application, it contains ADF region:

Main application contains single page with two tabs, imported region is in second tab. First tab contains Master-Detail implementation:

Application is pretty simple, but first thing I noticed WAR deployment archive size - around 60 MB, lots of ADF libraries are packaged into WAR. No wonder Glassfish server goes out of memory after couple of redeployments. ADF Essentials are deployed into Glassfish domain LIB folder, in addition different ADF libraries are included into WAR package as well. In order to decrease WAR size a bit, we can enable compression option (it allows to decrease WAR size by around 15 MB in this case):

Compressed WAR size is 44 MB:

List of ADF libraries in deployment WAR file:

ADF runtime performance on Glassfish was quite good, it looked to me even a bit faster comparing to WebLogic - but I could verify this only after JMeter stress test. Master-Detail data was loading pretty fast:

ADF region imported from ADF library didnt work for me - empty block is rendered:

Region error is reported in Glassfish log:

Important: I have tested the same application on WebLogic server with full ADF - the same imported ADF region from ADF library was rendering correctly. ADF library support formally is available in ADF Essentials, this means we are hitting some bug here.

This proves that there are runtime differences between ADF application running on full ADF and on ADF Essentials. If application runs on full ADF, it doesn't mean it will run on ADF Essentials, it will require additional testing.

UPDATE 26/09/2012: ADF region imported from ADF library works. I did one more redeployment for the main application on Glassfish server - suddenly it works now. I can see ADF region rendered from ADF library:

Probably some parameter was not registered correctly during initial deployment.