So it was a pleasant surprise to stumble over a blog post by Floyd Teter that linked to a set of screen shots showing off some of the Fusion Applications screens - check them out to see how Oracle is using ADF.

Search them up in the schedule builder and sign up.

S298887 Oracle Forms in an SOA World

S300209 Oracle Forms as JavaServer Faces Components, Enabling Gradual Migration

S300196 Birds Do It: Using Oracle Fusion Application Development Framework to Migrate Forms to Java EE Web--A Case Study

S298888 Oracle JHeadstart: Unprecedented Productivity in Developing Rich Oracle Application Development Framework Applications

S300199 Oracle JDeveloper with Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle Fusion Stack: Is It Oracle Forms Developer Yet?

S298724 Redeveloping an Oracle Forms Application with Oracle Application Development Framework: A Case Study

S298688 Oracle Application Development Framework 11g: New Declarative Validation, List of Values, Search, and Services Features

S298745 Simpler Application Development: An Overview of Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle Application Development Framework

S298739 RIAs and Web 2.0 Development Made Simple

And some hands-on labs to give you a feel of how JDeveloper development stacks compared to Oracle Forms:

S298899 Hands-on Lab: Oracle Fusion Development--The Business Services Layer
S298905 Hands-on Lab: Oracle Fusion Development--Creating Web User Interfaces

S298890 Hands-on Lab: Building Rich Internet Applications with Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components

So if you want to meet me, the best place would probably be the OOW demground.
I'll be in the JDeveloper and RIA booths (A25 and A28) in Moscone South at these times:

Monday 12-1
Tuesday 9-11
Wednesday 1:30-4

Beside those I'm also going to be delivering two hands-on labs about ADF Faces Rich Client (Session ID: S298890) on Sunday 10:30 and Tuesday 2:30 at the Marriott Golden Gate C1

And I'll be doing three sessions:
The limitations of JSF and how to overcome them (Session ID: S298685) - Tue 4 at Marriott
Nob Hill AB

A JDeveloper 11g and ADF Overview (Session ID: S298745) - Wed 11:30 at Marriott Salon 07

RIAs and Web 2.0 Development Made Simple (Session ID: S298739 ) - Thu 1:30 at Marriott Salon 04

See you at OOW.

The nice part about building the demo is that I got to try out in more details some of the components that I didn't had the time to drill into in the past. Specifically the hierarchy viewer and the Geographical Map.
Those are two of our Data Visualization components and I must say I'm pleased at how easy they are to create and customize, and even more pleased with the end user experience they provide. They'll probably make it into some of my other demos at OOW sessions and the demoground.

In the meantime if you haven't already done so, add the monday keynote to your OOW schedule.

Last week I did a web seminar for our partners showing off Oracle ADF 11g - you can now watch the recording of this session here.

About half of the session is dedicated to demos - and if you are not interested to hear the explanation of what ADF is, why we have it, and what it does you can just jump to the demos from the right side navigation menu.

The short answer is YES.

There are two ways of doing this.
One is just build an ADF application directly accessing the database underlying your application.
All you need is the DB connection info and an understanding of the underlying tables.

However one thing to note here is that Oracle EBS and other applications usually use roles when they are accessing the DB from UIs - and using the above approach you are not using the roles/security that are set in the applications.

So the more "correct" way of accessing these enterprise systems would be to use SOA - or basically access the applications through the official interfaces they expose. These would basically be web services that allow you to interact with the system using correct roles and security.

A very basic way of doing this from ADF is to use the Web Service Data Control - or just create a java class that access the Web Service and then expose it as a data control.
You can also of course bring in the full Oracle SOA Suite with its set of adapters into the picture.

Some other questions you might have are:
Is this recommended by Apps?
Yes it is one of the top ways they tell you to prepare for Fusion apps. See the "Highlight" section of this page.

Do you have samples/demos?
Here's one for PeopleSoft.
Here's a how-to for Siebel.

Do you have customers doing this?
The answer is yes - we have several customers doing it (for example see Viewsonic story) and we also have Oracle products doing this (Siebel Self Service 8.1).

Where do I get more info?
One place to start would be the fusion middleware for apps page on OTN.

To register (and get more details) go here: http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=2931347&Act=41

This is part of the partner training effort we'll be doing for ADF 11g.
Since it is the framework that is used for Fusion applications we expect a lot of requierments poping up for ADF consultants that can help in customizing and extending applications using ADF.

We'll also be hosting the first partner training on ADF 11g in October at Oracle HQ - if you are interested in this one - here are more details.

Their immediate call to action is running an ADF Methodology session at Oracle OpenWorld as part of the un-conference program.
You can read about this session in this Oracle wiki page.

This is definitely a must attend session for anyone who is doing ADF work - you can register here.

That said aside, their Google group is also worth reading in the meantime. They are discussion all sorts of interesting things in there. So check it out here.

Last year we had multiple hands-on labs and several sessions that ran out of space in the room - in these cases entrance into the sessions is limited to people who pre-registered to them through the session builder tool.

So I would recommend that if you already know of specific sessions you want to be in - go into the schedule builder and add them to your schedule as soon as you can.

This also gives us at Oracle a bit more feedback on which sessions are more popular and in some cases allows us enough time to move popular sessions to bigger rooms and sometime event offer a re-run of a session.

Check out the fix-list here and go to OTN to download if you have an issue that got resolved.

Here is the quick how-to.
We'll use the default Employees and Departments table from the HR schema. Just create default JPA entities on them with the JDev wizard and then create a service facade and right click it to create a data control.

First you'll drag the Departments object from the queryDepartmentsFindAll DC onto a JSF page and drop as an ADF Form.
Now you want to show the name of the manager of each department in a drop down list.
To do this expand the Employees object underneath the departments and click the firstName.

Drag it over to the JSF page and drop as a selectOneChoice component.
You'll be prompted to bind the list. You want to bind it to a list of employees - so you'll create a new List data source based on the queryEmployeesFindAll

You'll map the EmployeeID and you can choose to display the first name.
Like this:

And that's it. Run the page and it will look like this:

Well it got merged into the Oracle Develop conference this year at OOW.

Last month when I posted my previous entry on this year's Oracle Develop conference, I said we have 135 sessions in the conference - turns out we actually have 188 sessions according to the content catalog.

Most of the sessions that got added have to do with WebLogic/BEA products.
A quick search on "WebLogic" brings back over 25 sessions and hands-on labs and seraching for JRockit will bring more.

So if you are a WebLogic developer, we hope you'll join us this year at Oracle Develop and OOW.

The workshop is built from two half days - the first half consist of presentations and demos that will introduce you to the concepts of development used for Fusion Applications development. In the second half of the day you'll be running through hands-on labs and actually experience building a complete application.

We are covering the ADF stack used by the Fusion Applications inside Oracle (ADF Business Components, ADF Controller and ADF Faces Rich Client Components).

This workshop is a great introduction to the future of application development in the Oracle world.
Beyond our regular Java audience, we expect to see also Apps customers (EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel etc), Forms customers and of course BEA customers who won't to see a more productive approach to Java based application development.

Check out the current schedule here.

If you don't see an event coming to your town - contact your local Oracle office and ask them to make sure this roadshow comes to your location. (They can call me if they need details on how to get this going).

I'll be doing the event in Pennsylvania on July 22nd - drop by and say hello.

JDeveloper is still Oracle's strategic IDE and since we now also have the WebLogic Java EE server, you might be wondering what type of integration do we have in place between the two.
Well as a matter of fact we have been certifying JDeveloper and the ADF framework with WebLogic for a long time.
As a result you can do direct deployment from JDeveloper to a remote WebLogic Server.
You can also deploy the ADF Runtime libraries on such a server and have an ADF application running there.

Just to prove it, I recorded an online demo and wrote a how-to that shows you how to connect JDeveloper to WebLogic and deploy the SRDemo ADF sample application on top of it.

Get the details here.

An interesting coincidence is that I had 199 blog entries on the previous server and this new blog server gets my 200 entry - nice round number.

So welcome to my new blog and let me know if you are missing anything from the old blog and I'll try and fix it.