New to OA Framework

OAF stands for Oracle Applications Framework and is a MVC architecture based J2EE framework customized for use in Oracle Applications development. It is tailor made for use in the development, customization of Oracle Apps pages and any custom application development to be hosted, integrated in Oracle Apps. OAF provides classes for all the standard web widgets seen on the Self Service pages like Text field, List of Values, Table, HGrid, Buttons etc. You can get that detail in the OAF Dev guide.
Only choice of tool to work with OAF is Jdeveloper with OA Extension. There is no OA extension /plugin available for any other IDE. This is another factor where people keep getting confused. Jdeveloper is a generic Java IDE but the one without the OA extension can't be used for OAF development. OA extension is what provides the required OA libraries and enables OA based Workspace, Project creation.
OAF is the only option for any Oracle Apps related development. Release 11i and recently launched Release 12 version of Oracle Apps is based on OAF. For look & feel and business logic changes to Oracle provided seeded Self Service pages, one can make use of Extension and Personalization features of OAF. Modifications done following the Extension and Personalization guidelines are upgrade and patch safe. Any direct modification made to seeded code will be overwritten during the patching.
If You are going to start work in OA Framework,

1). The First thing you should khow which patch is suitable for your Orcale application release.
2). Once you get the patch number of OA Extension, Download it from the metalink & just extract that zip file into your machine.

a). Then you have to configure the JDEV_USER_HOME Environment Variable, Please follow these setup to configure this:
- Go to your desktop and select My Computer, right-click and select Properties.
- On the System Properties dialog, select the Advanced tab.
- On the Advanced page, select the Environment Variables button.
- On the Environment Variables dialog, select the New button from the User variables for box.
- On the New User Variable dialog, enter JDEV_USER_HOME in the Variable Name field. Set the Variable Value field to :\jdevhome\jdev where is the drive where you installed the JDeveloper OA Extension zip file. For example: c:\jdevhome\jdev. - Select OK in each of the dialogs you opened to save the new user environment variable.

b). Obtaining a Database Connection File
- Obtain the FND database connection (.dbc) file from the system administrator who installed the OA Framework database where you want to do your development. Place this file in the \dbc_files\secure directory.

Then start your Jdeveloper and start working in OA Framework.