If you have children, you might be making gingerbread figures for Christmas. Your artistic children are likely to be handcrafting each figure individually—but you, as an efficiency-oriented adult, are probably using a cookie cutter to produce a whole batch of almost identical Santas.

When you need to create many similar objects efficiently, you use a template (similar to your cookie cutter). When you need to create dozens of task flows and hundreds of screens, all with some common elements, you use the ADF cookie cutters: task flow templates and page templates for the frontend view part and framework extension classes for the backend Business Component part.