OAF vs ADF 10g

OA Framework:

• OAF includes AOL which provides e-business functionality like functions, menus, responsibility, functional security, data security, messages, profiles, flexfields, and concurrent programs.
• List of Values – validation, auto complete, auto clear is available in OAF.
• Transactional Search – Query Bean is available in OAF.
• Data export, Configurable pages and Rich text editor is available in OAF.
• OAF supports translatable table (TL tables).
• Who columns like created by, modified by, creation date, modified date are supported in OAF.
• Since OAF is tightly integrated with E-Business session management is done automatically.
• Menu that appears at the top of the page is integrated with AOL menus. Hence the menus can be configured dynamically by manipulating AOL menus and no coding is required.
• Functional security is available in OAF which allows you to configure the responsibility dynamically for the user.
• User authentication is done from SSO. So no need to configure or write any code.
• Data security is available.
• Secured against cross site scripting attack.
• OAF page access can be tracked.
• Standards and guidelines are available for developing extensions in OAF which is the most important thing.
• Reusable regions are available in OAF.
• UI cannot be migrated to ADF 11g (may be in the future Oracle will come up with migration utility for UI but even then only declarative pages would be migrated and the UI pages should have followed the coding standards strictly).
• BC4J can be migrated with minimal code change.
• Controller cannot be migrated hence you have to rewrite all the logics in the controller if you want to migrate it to ADF 11g.

ADF 10g

• ADF 10g does not include any support for AOL
• List of Values and its associated features like validation, auto complete and clear does not exists in ADF.
• No Transactional search, Data Export, Configurable pages or Rich text editor.
• No support of Translatable Table and who columns.
• No support for E-business suite session management.
• No support for integration with Oracle Workflow.
• E-business security features are totally unavailable in ADF 10g. (security features include Data security, functionally security, SSO etc)
• Page access cannot be tracked in ADF 10g.
• No support of for menus in ADF.
• Reusable regions cannot be created in ADF 10g.
• ADF 10g can be easily migrated to ADF 11g.
• And most of all you cannot extend or personalize the existing page with the help of ADF.

ADF has many advantages starting from the underlying architecture, the level of support for Web Services and SOA development and going all the way to the actual development experience of UIs using visual editor and drag and drop binding. 

Conclusion

• If you want to build few pages with close integration of e-business suite then opt for OA framework. Remember if you want to migrate your code to ADF 11g in the future, you have to follow the coding standards strictly and code all the business logic in bc4j rather than handling the logic in controller.
• If you don’t want a close integration e-business suite or your building entirely new application then go for ADF 10g.