ADF Business Components are part of a deep and wide framework which can be used to build database enabled java applications. It is very easy (also thanks to the Jdeleveloper IDE) to begin working with them and to build data driven applications. But as with any such big framework it is sometimes difficult to gain a good understanding of how to go past the common usage patterns.
What is needed is higher level knowledge of the way the various framework classes work together, and which are the interfaces and the API handles you could use to fulfill a specific application need.
This article form Steve Muench gives you:
a high-level description of the key ADF Business Components classes in the Oracle Application Development Framework, summarizing the methods that ADF developers write, call, and override most frequently.
When i began using bc4j in 2001 i spent quite some time to understand how the different pieces fit together, and some of the solutions i found were not so correct (aka hacks…) from the framework point of view. This document would have saved me more than some headaches!
Also highly recommended for anyone working with ADF is Steve’s weblog: Dive into BC4J and ADF