Oracle Autonomous Mobile Cloud Enterprise Reviews

The most valuable feature of the product is the fact that I can write once, in my preferred coding language (Java) and deploy to multiple platforms. In the beginning the supported platforms were iOS and Android, but recently Oracle was able to add the Windows platform as well.

Our Java developers can now build mobile apps for all platforms at once. For us, instead of having to hire iOS, Android and Windows developers, we can use our own pool of Java developers.

The first one is re-use. There are some concepts of re-use in MAF however, there could be more, and at a more granular level. Currently one can only re-use complete features, whereas it would be nice to also be able to re-use individual 'taskflows'. Furthermore, better support for UI templating would be a very welcome enhancement. What I'mr referring to here is to have UI templates available that enable us to implement Oracle's ALTA UI patterns easier, and not only ALTA UI look and feel.

I have been working with Oracle MAF since the very beginning, and even before that with its predecessors. If I recall correctly, my first encounter with Oracle Mobile development frameworks was back in 2010. The Oracle MAF framework was released in Q1 2014, and before that I was able to work with the beta of Oracle MAF.

There have been issues with stability in the past, but in the recent releases this has improved.

For us, being a partner with close contact to Oracle Product Management, there has never been issue with service and support. Also, the Oracle forums are very valuable whenever I need detailed technical information.

Initial setup is neither complex nor straightforward, and the initial setup is described in detail in the developer guide. However, this involves many steps. You have to prepare the development machine for multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Windows) and this takes time. Also, acquiring the appropriate certificates can be times consuming. However, this has nothing to do with the MAF product itself, and one would have this with all mobile development tools.

We did several implementations as an Oracle Partner at our customers. So in this case we are a vendor team. If I look at individual customers I would advise them to start with a dedicated in-house team with support of a vendor or preferred Oracle Partner. This helps the in-house team to get started.

There has always been a debate on the pricing of the product. People tend to finding it expensive. There are some ways to work with Oracle on that, and one other option is to combine Oracle MAF with Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS). An Oracle MCS license gets you unlimited MAF applications. This is worth considering for every customer.

If you are using other tools from the Oracle stack, and are considering the implementation of mobile solutions, you should definitely consider using Oracle MAF. MAF development is similar to the development of other Oracle Middleware tools/frameworks, thus enabling your existing developer pool to work on the mobile solutions. I would also advice to at least look at Oracle MCS. Oracle MCS can actually help you to open up your enterprise to the mobile landscape, without directly exposing it to the big bad mobile world.

Very easy to use and start building apps for people with an Oracle ADF background.

We've been using it to build our first mobile app POC for the company.

We've been using it for six months for POCs on a couple of products.

At the time we got it, the product was not very mature, but in the newer versions the framework has become much more mature/stable.

10/10 - Oracle support is one of the best in my opinion.

Oracle Mobile Application Framework was the first solution of this type we tried.

Pretty easy if you have an Oracle ADF development background and you are familiar with tools like JDeveloper.

We deployed it in-house.

The licensing was very confusing at the time we began evaluating the product, and I'm not sure if Oracle has changed it.

We didn't look at other options prior to commencing our POC.

The product looks very promising specially if you already have an many Oracle production in-house like Oracle SOA.

Since Oracle MAF consumes REST WebServices, it was pretty fast to build, deploy and consume our existing Oracle ADF applications based on ADF-BC into our native mobile app based on the hybrid model.

We developed our native device app using Oracle MAF for our customers and partners so that they can make a note of their applications' status on the fly and submit any queries with reference to their competency applications. The whole business process was driven through our Oracle MAF application.

As Oracle MAF is a heavy product, it doesn’t allow much space to convince customers to go with the product suite. Also, the plug-ins and out of the box features need to be added into the library to offer an easy to use PPR. Also, enabling push notifications would certainly increase its popularity.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The amount of memory it takes has a significant impact when comparing development tools.

It's been able to scale for our customer's needs.

We set it up for one of our customers.

We worked as a vendor to deliver the native device application for existing Oracle ADF investments of the customer.

It lacks a number of out of the box features. Additionally, debugging and diagnosing is a bit tricky and not much time has been spent by Oracle on improving the UI.

It can be deployed on multiple platforms, and it can communicate with banks, web services, and data controls.

It needs more native capabilities built into the platform, and alert messages without the need for plugins.

I've used it for around a year.

There were no issues with the deployment.

I had some problems with the location monitor in some Android devices, but this has been fixed in newer versions.

We haven't needed to scale it.

Really enjoyed the support service that was provided. Of course there is some difficulty in explaining the problem and even recreating it for them.

It was simple and direct.

We did it in-house.

I researched other solutions that also would attend. The choice of MAF was by now working with Oracle products and also because we are partners.

The most valuable feature in my experience is that you can develop it just one time for several OS's. This is a native option for MAF, the programming language used by Mobile Cloud Service. You just need to develop or program the app one time and choose the OS on which it's going to run. For example, our CRM application can be executed both in Android and iOS.

It's also available both on- and off-line.

We were able to develop an app for our sales reps in just three months, improving their day-to-day tasks. It helped as we did not need to install a development machine as everything is in the cloud. The development tools are easy to use by programmers, and MCS allows us to use pre-existing standard connectors to our legacy system, Siebel.

There are internal processes that need improvement, such as time-off requests and expense report workflows. With the expense reports, for example, we need to collect all physical tickets, fill in an Excel report with the details of each expense, print it, sign it, and send it for approval. They should develop an app in order to just take a photo of the ticket, fill in the app the details, and submit it electronically for approval. 

There were no issues with the deployment.

It is true that we are not as happy as we would like in terms of syncing. Sometimes it takes a long time, but we are working on this. We need to move a large amount of data and it is obviously a problem in and of itself.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

We evaluated other solutions, but in the end we always found problems trying to connect with Siebel or trying to have the same app work under iOS and Android. This is why we chose MCF as it allows us to do both.

It is important to choose a good partner to go with.

• The AMPA (A-Team Mobile Persistence Accelerator) with offline functionality and SQLite cache
• Possibility to deploy to three different platforms
• Easy to consume REST web services
• A lot of nice visualisation components with animations etc.
• If you know the Oracle stack with ADF, it is easy to learn MAF
• A lot of cloud service integrations

We use multiple apps internally to enter our workslips or to book our travels for customers. MAF is a real help in managing all this.

The performance of animations could be faster. Also, the applications archive is quite big and could be better.

I have used this solution for two years.

A mobile development takes more time than desktop development because of the limitations of hardware, accessibility, and screen size. The little things for optimizations at the end take up much of the time - this should be part of the quote and pricing!

Apple has a strict process of how it deploys an application to devices via iTunes or in a business environment with certificates, etc. This is kind of hellish, but it's an issue with Apple and not a problem with MAF.

We have had no issues with the stability.

It has been able to scale for our needs.

If you use the OTN forum in the correct MAF threads, you receive really fast, really good answers to your problems. Especially for AMPA, the help is great.

Oracle JDeveloper is used to develop MAF. It is a simple plugin and very easy to install and use afterwards. The UI can be designed with drag-and-drop and has a visual designer to provide a quick response.

I am the project leader for the MAF project at a customer. I also provide help for in-house solutions we create. You should use a REST web service created on an application module inside the business components because the AMPA backend logic is easier to use with the "describe" URL with this kind of REST.

The little things for optimizations at the end take up a lot of time - this should be part of the quote and pricing.

There exists different hybrid solutions in the market with open source products, but if you want to have support and a real business solution, then there is no better solution that I've seen.

If you know the middleware solution of Oracle called ADF, MAF will feel similar. It is easy to consume a REST web service and it allows you to cache automatically the received data into a SQLite database. With that, you can automatically work offline against this database. Changes are logged and you have the ability to sync the "dirty data" back to the server afterwards. This is a real benefit and is easy to use. Additionally, it allows you to deploy to all the big environments like Apple, Android, and Windows, so there's only one development and multiple rollout possibilities.

A big question for "bring you own device" ideas is the way to handle de-installations and the company's data on a private device. Oracle offers a good sandbox solution for this which can be very helpful to administrate and distribute apps (Oracle Mobile Security Suite).

Since it's a hybrid application framework, we can maintain one code base for different platforms. Also, we can leverage our Java and JavaScript skills.

It has helped the organization to reduce the turnaround time and improve productivity as it equipped us to churn out cross-platform applications faster (Android/iOS).

It's helped us to handle end-to-end lifecycle for enterprise mobility solutions.

On top of it, we did not actually have to hire/train new resources as the developers could quickly adapt to the framework as it supports standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and is available as a plug-in for both JDeveloper 12.1.3 and Eclipse IDEs.

IPA/APK file sizes are very large compared to builds generated using other technologies.

It needs more control on gestures and animations.

While taking iOS builds using JDeveloper, sometimes it fails. To debug, we have to use Xcode.

Also, the IDE gets slower while connecting to subversion.

Also, build generation time is longer comparing to other technologies.

It's stable now, but there are the issues described above.

We have had no issues scaling it for our needs.

Forums and groups are not very active, and we were not able to find answers for our queries by searching documentation.

The initial steps are a little bit complex because a lot of the dependency is related to Java JDeveloper, Android, and iOS versions.

We implemented it in-house. Oracle MAF is evolving as of now, but there are some limitations that we came across.

The only challenge with MAF is that the forum support is not up to mark and it sometimes gets difficult to resolve issues/limitations while implementing mobile app solutions.

I would highly recommend Oracle MAF as it is:

1. Single Platform – It handles end-to-end life cycle for enterprise mobility solutions.
   
2. Hybrid Framework – It supports developing Android and iOS applications with Single Source Code.
   
3. Easy for Developers - to adopt using existing skills
   It supports standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript
   Java forms the core for Business Logic.
   It is available as a plug-in for both JDeveloper 12.1.3 and Eclipse IDEs.
   
4. Speeds up UI development:
   It is based on MVC framework,
   It consists of in-built UI components and CSS features,
   It uses declarative custom components for drag & drop development,
   The platform enables accessing device features such as camera, contacts, GPS etc. using in-built Cordova plug-in,
   Additional plug-ins which allows extension of app’s functionality such as barcode scanning is also available,
   It supports development of applications that can work in offline mode by using local SQLite database,
   Developers can debug the applications using the framework.
   
5. Security – It includes extended enterprise security with in-built security framework.

• Hybrid framework eliminates the need for specific skills for specific platforms.
• Suitable and perfect transition for ADF/Java Developers.
• Complete suite of rich UI components that fits our needs.

Oracle MAF is based on the Oracle ADF Framework. It helped us to offer mobile solutions easily and quickly without having to learn a complete framework from scratch.

• Performance
• Size of the applications

I've been using it for two years.

We've had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

We have not had any scaling issues.

It could be improved. Sometimes takes too long to receive proper solutions and answers or bug fixes.

I used other frameworks such AngularJS and Ionic as they are free.

The initial setup is quite easy and there is a lot of documentation, tutorials and information published by Oracle.

We implemented it with our in-house team.

From my experience, an Oracle MAF implementation requires very good knowledge of Oracle ADF, Cordova, and Java.

The license is not suitable for small to mid-level clients. I consider the license prices too expensive and Oracle MAF does not offer something new that other free frameworks offer.

Oracle MAF is designed for larger companies who are already running Oracle Fusion middleware products. Oracle MAF can be easily integrated with other Oracle Solutions and then it increases the productivity and the speed for delivering Mobile Solutions. However, it should be considered if it makes sense buying licenses of Oracle MAF or using free frameworks are enough.