ADF Faces briefly

As internet applications developed there was a greater value in having them behave like desktop applications. Vendors created RIA fwks that required users to install plugins to be able to use their features. As java web applications became more popular there was a need identified to have a standard view-layer framework. JCP (java community process) developer JSF as a UI standard for java web applications.

JSF being a part of the Java EE standard, vendors developed their own components that could run on any compliant application server. These components would be more sophisticated. Oracle developed a set of components called ADF Faces that exceeded the the functionality of standard JSF components and can run on any runtime implementation of JSF. Along with providing more complex components ADF faces also introduce partial page rendering (PPR) with AJAX.

Oracle has since donated the ADF Faces component libraray to Apache Software Foundation and is known as Apache MyFaces Trinidad.

AJAX  (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a set of technologies that allow for creation of interactive web applications. These technologies are implemented on the client side and enable the web page to retrieve data from the server, asynchronously in the background, without affective the display or state of the page. Data is usually retrieved using XMLHttpRequest object. Despite the name the user of JavaScript, XML is not actually required and the request might not necessarily be asynchronous.