Shay Shmeltzer's Weblog

I must admit that I wasn't aware of this and I'm guessing that if this is news for me it might be news for other people so I wanted to blog about it.

Turns out that the af:inputDate components in ADF Faces can actually allow your customers to select a time(hour/minutes/seconds) as well as a date.

All you have to do to see it in action is give your ADF BC EO date field the type of Timestemp instead of Date, and possibly add a nice format mask under the UI hints like: yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss
and you should get a calendar popup that looks like this:

While we are on the subject of date and time, I'll put another note here that the format mask that you use for an ADF BC date or timestemp format comes from the Java Date type.
Something like the table you can find here.

We did a lot of enhancements in the visual editor in the new JDeveloper 11g 11.1.1.2. I recorded this short 3 minute demo to show you a couple of the things that are a bit hidden, but can be useful to know.
The demo shows:
Changing screen resolution for easier editing

Setting binding display options

A hidden convert option that you get with right mouse drag from the component palette.
Check it out:

TaskFlows (or the ADF controller) is one of the more powerful features of ADF - but also one that many people find hard to grasp.
We've just published a new tutorial about TaskFlows on OTN that shows some of the functionality it offers such as:

• Reusable flows


• Trains


• Transaction management


• Routers


• Parameter and flow scope


• Using flows in other flows and in regions

So if you are still stuck using the "old" JSF controller - give this one a try out to see some of the cool things the taskflows allow you to do.

The current survey on the OTN forum asked people whether they used the visual editor or code editor when developing their JSF. Well not surprisingly most people answered "Both".

So if you are using the code editor while developing JSF - check out the new code templates available for you:

For example you can just type afcl+CTRL+Enter and get a command link, and your cursor will be ready in place to change the text property.
Just one of the little things improved in this release.

Along with the new JDeveloper release we also put out a new version of the ADF Faces components demo.
This is a stand alone WAR file that you can download and run on your own machine (or watch the hosted version). The WAR contains a demo of each one of the ADF Faces components as well as demos of various framework features like the push to client, dialogs, drag and drop etc.
It also have skinning information for the components, and the complete Javadoc for all of them.

Two key things that are new in the demo - beyond the new components and actual demos is that it combines both the "regular" ADF Faces components with the Data Visualization components into a single demo file.
And it also has an option to list the components in a functional breakdown.
All you need to do is add ?gallery=true to the end of the URL and you'll get a set of accordions on the side that provide easier navigation through the components.

Looking like this:

There has been a lot of noise in the blogsphere lately about JDeveloper vs. NetBeans over the last week - especially after the last update to Oracle's Sun FAQ that added a paragraph about Netbeans.

As an Oracle Employee I can't comment about anything that relates to this deal, but I would like to comment about one of the points that some Netbean-bloggers have been raising - and this is their claim that the number of Netbeans users is way bigger than those using JDeveloper.

I'm still trying to figure out how they came to this conclusion.

Some of them claim they haven't encountered many people who use JDeveloper - I guess this all depends on where you are hanging out. I'm guessing the picture they see when hanging at Sun conferences, such as JavaOne, is a little skewed. after all at the Oracle conferences I attend - I seem to meet a lot more JDeveloper users :-).

Hunting down reliable third party statistics on the breakdown of the Java IDE market is no easy task, but here are some numbers that might cast a question mark on those claims:

One independent survey of the Java IDE market was the SD Times Survey which last ran in 2008. It showed NetBeans at 24.4%. and Oracle's JDeveloper at 20.4% usage.
I would hardly call this a huge difference in the size of the community.

Now lets look at some more up-to-date statistics
Indeed job search shows more demand for JDeveloper compared to NetBeans out there

Another way to check the health of a community is to look at the traffic on its forum
Looking at traffic on the Netbeans forums - it seems like they get around 10-15 new threads each day on their user forum and even less than that on the Java EE forum: http://forums.netbeans.org/javaee-users.html

JDeveloper gets around 80 new threads on our forum on an average day.

I won't draw any clear cut conclusions here - I'll let you do that for yourself now that you see some other numbers.

A new version of JDeveloper is out on OTN - looking at the version number you might think this is just a patch release with some bug fixes, but in reality it is quite a major release for us.

The new features document should be here shortly.

In the meantime, some of the features you might want to explore are:

• New Maven extension


• More functionality in the data control for EJBs (query and range fetching support)


• New skin for ADF Faces (Fusion skin) which also adds a bunch of animation to things


• New ADF Faces components - carousel, sparkel graph, autosuggest behavior, emailable pages and more


• Improvement in the JSF visual editor


• Better debugger and logging for ADF


• Bugzilla integration in TPC


• New features in the database designer


• UML 2.0 support

And much more.

Download today and start playing...

I got asked this today, and this seems to be a question that pops up every now and again, so I thought I'll document this little piece of code.

The scenario is that you have a drop down list using a selectOneChoice component on your page - and you want to find out the selected value in a backing bean.
For example the departmentId field in this page:

The first thing everyone try and do is to access the list component in a backing bean and invoke the getValue method on it. But then they realize that this only returns the actual index of the row that was selected and not the value.

The following little piece of code will get you that value.
What it does is access the bindings object, get the list binding, and then invoke the getSelectedValue method on it.

public void buttonPressed(ActionEvent actionEvent) {

// Get the binding
BindingContainer bindings =
BindingContext.getCurrent().getCurrentBindingsEntry();
// Get the sepecific list binding
JUCtrlListBinding listBinding =
(JUCtrlListBinding)bindings.get("DepartmentId");
// Get the value which is currently selected
Object selectedValue = listBinding.getSelectedValue();
System.out.println(selectedValue);
}

Note that the binding name I'm getting (DepartmentId) is the last one in this picture - see the list binding icon next to it.

If you are wondering what you haven't seen updates on your twitter JDeveloper feed, it might be that you missed the fact that we moved it to a new user.
Update your bookmarks/tracking service:
http://twitter.com/jdeveloper

Or update your RSS feedreader:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/29300975.rss

One comment I heard at OOW from a couple of people was that it seems that ADF has a much bigger presence at this year conference.
I guess that one reason for this is that a bunch of products/applications that have been in the works last year are now in production and were show cased at OOW this year.

Things like the new SOA Suite BPM Worklist:

Or the new Enterprise Manager:

Or WebCenter Spaces:

Add to this the UIs we built for the Thomas Kurian's keynote:

The UI's some of our customers showed.

And of course the UI's of the Oracle Fusion Applications that Larry showed in his keynote:

Check out more of those screen shots here.