Shay Shmeltzer's Weblog

One of my tasks for the Fusion Middleware 11g launch event was to build the JDeveloper/ADF part of the demo (along with Juan).
One key thing that made a difference in the resulting demo was that we got help in the design of the pages from a professional UI designer - Soraya looked at the pages we designed initially and then gave us tips on how to make the application look cleaner. She also gave us the images that were used in the application. We then worked on layouting the page according to her recommendations and on skinning some of them.

One tip for better looking UI is to try and eliminate as much clutter from your UI as possible - the application we got at the end used far less components on each page.

While you can see the result in the recorded webcast of the launch event - I thought that for JSF developers out there I would give a full screen view and skip the 40 minutes talk that come before Duncan gets to actually run through the demo.
So here is a recording of the demo running on my machine - with some explanation about the specific components used in each place.
One key point - everything in this demo's UI was done decoratively with no Javascript coding.

What are you doing here - go to OTN and download the new Oracle JDeveloper 11g R1 (11.1.1.1.0) - code name Bulldog.

Major new features include:

* Oracle Team Productivity Center - Hot Pluggable ALM solution for JDeveloper
* Oracle MDS - Declarative Customizations and Personalization
* SOA Development - with the new Oracle SOA Suite 11g
* WebCenter Development - with the new Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g
* Oracle ADF Desktop Integration - build Excel frontend for ADF
But there are hundreds of new features detailed here.
We also have new tutorials, new demos, new developer guides and more.
All are on the JDeveloper page on OTN.

Here are the slides for my ODTUG session titled "7 Tips for a Better JDeveloper Experience".

The thing I like about the ODTUG conference is that we can actually go beyond the overview level presentations and do some deep technical ones.

This set of slides is such an example. The idea here was to collect specific things that I think are very useful for your daily work with JDeveloper and that I think a lot of developers haven't noticed or overlooked. Those are little things that can sum up to make a big improvement in how you interact with JDeveloper. While it might not be as clear without the demos I did during the presentation you might still get some value out of it.
So go ahead and run through the slides and see if you find some tip that will benefit you.

I'm not sure if I'll get another chance to do this presentation again - who knows maybe I'll have time to do it in the OOW unconference section this year.

Back in the 10.1.3 days I wrote an entry that showed how to set the value of a parameter that is referenced in your page's binding by writing some code in your backing bean.
Well with 11g we moved to JSF 1.2 and things have changed a bit.
And today I needed to look up the update syntax for a demo I was working on.

Since this is a useful little piece of code I'm pasting it here for my own future reference.
A special shout out to Edwin Biemond for this post that has a lot of other useful code bits.
If you want more of these download the Fusion Order demo and look up the JSFUtil java class that is used throughout the demo when coding in the backing bean is needed.

[code]
FacesContext facesCtx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
Application app = facesCtx.getApplication();
ExpressionFactory elFactory = app.getExpressionFactory();
ELContext elContext = facesCtx.getELContext();
ValueExpression ve =
elFactory.createValueExpression(elContext, "#bindings.p_zip.inputValue}",
Object.class);
ve.setValue(elContext, newValue);
[/code]

I haven't blogged here for a month and a half. It's been crazy busy at work working towards the 11g launch event (July 1st) - and these are usually things you can't blog on anyway cause they are classified as top secret for now :-)

Another thing we've been working on right now is the upcoming Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop conferences at San Francisco.
If you are planning on being there, and you should, then you have a chance to get more sessions about the topics that interest you by voting in the Oracle Mix "sessions by users requests" survey.

Specifically for the JDeveloper/ADF audience there is a selection of proposed sessions under the Oracle Develop stream/track. So join in the fun and get more JDeveloper content into the conference.

In the meantime - if you are in the ODTUG conference this week you'll definitely get a lot of ADF and JDeveloper content there. I'm going to be there Tue and Thu doing sessions and hands-on labs.
Specifically tomorrow my session is an introduction to the various data visualization components, what they do, and how to use them.
On Thu I'm doing a session filled with all sorts of small tips that hopefully would make your experience working with JDeveloper on a daily basis a bit more fun.
See you there.

Are you stuck at home afraid to go out because of the swine flu epidemic?
Here is something to do while you are there - watch an online seminar....

The last time I posted an online seminar which gave an overview of ADF 11g, people responded and said they would like to see more of these.
So here goes the next one in this series

"RIA and Web 2.0 Development Made Simpler" was actually first presented at Oracle Develop last year in SF. Now you can watch a slightly updated version of it online for free here:
http://download.oracle.com/otn_hosted_doc/jdeveloper/11gdemos/riasession/riademo.html

What you'll get in this 1 hour seminar is a brief introduction to what is RIA, what drives it and the approach Oracle is taking for building RIA and REA applications for Fusion with the Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client components.
Most of the session is actually a live demo that shows you both the development experience and the runtime user interface experience when working with ADF Faces. We cover templates, arranging your page content, advance data components, data visualization and framework capabilities such as windowing, drag and drop, partial page rendering, skinning etc.

If you think this format is cool, make sure to put the upcoming OTN Virtual Developer Day on your calendar. You'll get to see more free seminar like this one as well as be able to do hands-on labs in a virtual cloud environment.
With the new economy and the swine flu scare - this type of virtual conference just might be the next big thing.

This is actually a guest post - Marc Chanliau from the Oracle Web Service Manager product team sent me a quick email with instructions that he wrote up for installing JDeveloper on a macintosh - and I thought it would make a good blog post that might help people on OTN as well.

So here we go with Marc's instructions for:

Installing JDeveloper 11gR1 on Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard)

- Download jdevstudio11110install.jar from OTN (11.1.1.0.2).

1. Make Java 6 the default JVM on your Mac
- Run Java Preferences (in /Applications/Utilities/Java)
- Move the Java SE 6 (64 Bit) to the top of the Java application versions
list

2. In order for the installer to see JKD 1.6 on your Mac, you need to create
a sym link for classes.jar:
cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home
sudo mkdir jre
cd jre
sudo mkdir lib
cd lib
sudo ln -s /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/classes/classes.jar rt.jar

3. Run the JDev installer by clicking on the jdevstudio11110install.jar you
downloaded -- this should automatically start the JAR Launcher and unpack
libraries.

If you keep all recommended install default values, JDev and ADF are installed
at:
/users/yourusername/oracle/middleware/jdeveloper
WebLogic Server gets installed at:
/users/yourusername/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3

4. To start JDev, you can create an alias in your .profile file as follows:
alias startjdev="/users/yourusername/oracle/middleware/jdeveloper/jdev/bin/jdev"

You might have missed it since it came in a bit late, but we managed to sneak in another OTN Fusion Developer Day in another part of the world - this time it is Sydney Australia.
So make sure to catch it here:
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=6656414&Act=22&pcode=APACMK08054841MPP026

Over the weekend we released a second update to JDeveloper 11g - you can download it now from OTN. This is mainly a bug fix release - you can find the list of fixed bugs here.

New this year for Oracle Open World and Oracle Develop is the ability for anyone to submit a session abstract to the event.

The call for papers is open for the next two weeks here: http://cplan.com/oracleopenworld2009/cfp/.

We would love to see more developers do sessions about ADF and JDeveloper.
Share your best tips, introduce some cool things you did in your project, explain your architecture, or give your top 5 things to watch out for.
One way to figure out what your session should be on is to think what session would have been useful for you a year ago - and then do that session this year to help new developers.

Another great reason to present is that you'll get a free pass to the conference as a speaker and you'll be able to check out other speakers sessions.