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.

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.

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.

It was basically a bunch of ADF customers showcasing a bit of the applications that they have running in production and talking about the special features that their system implements.
It was an interesting mix of both 10.1.3 and 11g versions.

A quick recap and some pictures:

Bashir from Innowave showed off the 11g UI they built to help users understand their business flows inside the Oracle SOA suite.

Wes from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center showed parts of their 10.1.3 applications that has been in production for 2 years now with about 200 users - managing medical info.

Andrejus from Red Samurai showed the 11g system that they built for MedNet to replace an Oracle Forms application.

John from the substance abuse 7 mental health service administration (SAMHSA) showed the 10.1.3 application they are about to put on the Web to help people locate centers near them where they can get help.

Greg from ECS showed the 11g system currently running at Collect America helping them collect debts.

One hour after the session ended there was another showcase of ADF based application - this time by Larry Ellison showing of the new Oracle Fusion Applications - but more on this in a separate entry.

We'll have ADF presentations from 9 till 5 including:

9:00 a.m. Rich Client Interfaces via Functional UI Patterns & Best Practices from
10:00 a.m. Extreme Faces Makeover - Inject ADF Faces Rich Client Components into your applications
11:00 a.m. The Secrets of ADF Region Interaction
1:00 p.m. ADF Methodology Group Meeting
2:00 p.m. ADF Methodology Group Meeting - Show me Yours session
3:00 p.m. Tips for JDeveloper Users - The Small things that make the difference
4:00 p.m. Data Visualization Components in a nutshell

The other advantage of coming to this set of sessions is that you won't need to go outside of Moscone south the whole day - and you'll stay dry.

See you tomorrow.