I am learning Oracle ADF framework and want to understand what service does the DataControl’s expose to the UIComponents. I understood that there is a binding container abstraction which is actually doing the binding between View Objects and UIComponents that are rendered in the page. What role is the datacontrol abstraction playing in this framework ?
In other words what is the relation between datacontrol and bindings that run in the binding environment and what can be called as the equivalent of DataControl in a normal Java EE application ?
The binding layer connects the UI layer to the data control layer.
Note that the UI layer can be a JSF page, an Excel spreadsheet, a Swing UI and an ADF Mobile page.
The datacontrol layer provides access to the business service in an abstracted way so the UI developer doesn’t need to know what specific technology the business service is implemented with.
To learn more about the binding/data control layers watch the two part seminar here:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/adf/learnmore/adfinsider-093342.html#a2
In the world of Java EE the closest thing would be CDI – but the ADF binding provides a much more complete solution targeting various type of UIs, various types of backend.