APEX vs ADF: Round 1

As announced before, on Monday I did a presentation together with Lucas Jellema about the differences in APEX and ADF.

On the right you see the picture I used on the first slide. You don’t know? Does David (APEX) and Goliath (ADF) rings a bell?

The goal was not to “tackle” each other, but show the audience both technologies. We had a lot of fun! Both Lucas and myself are very passionate about “our precious”, so once and a while we teased each other. The 80 people had some good laughs, the atmosphere was very energetic, something you can expect of a good “fight” ;-)

So what did we do?

Michiel Jonkers was the host and he welcomed everybody, prepared the audience for the evening and introduced both Lucas and myself.

Then I started with an Introduction about Oracle Application Express (about 30 mins). Where did it come from? How does the architecture look like? And why should you use APEX?
Then it was time for Lucas to do the same for ADF.

During the preparation we discussed how we would do it and finally decided to start from the same ERD and try to create a survey application in 6 hours. We would see how much we could do in that amount of time. I was impressed with what Lucas did in that amount of time in ADF (and JSF). A few years ago I worked with BC4J, so I knew a little bit of it, but I must say they let the product evolve largely.

So we both demonstrated our application and explained how we did it. You can see the application I made here. The presentation (with in it the break down of the time used to create the application) you find here.

After the break, with some great food, we both explained how you can start with both products and showed how to create an application.

At the end we had the Q&A. Some questions are always coming back: “When shouldn’t you use APEX/ADF?”, “Does APEX also work for large applications?”, “What about Business Logic” etc.

I had a great time! If you were there I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

PS/ Some others blogged about it too… Douwe Pieter van den Bos here and Marco Gralike here. If I missed yours, feel free to add a link in the comments. I believe Michiel Jonkers is also going to blog about it.