The Oracle ADF team is happy to announce the release of the Oracle Alta Workbetter ADF application sample.

You can now get the complete source code for this sample application, so you can further learn how to develop cool user interfaces with Oracle ADF Faces that implement the Oracle Alta UI design patterns.

At the last Oracle OpenWorld conference where we announced Oracle Alta UI, we got great reactions from people who saw the new Alta UI in our new cloud services and apps. And with Oracle ADF Faces it is very easy to implement these type of user interfaces in your application too. 

The WorkBetter sample application is aimed at highlighting various aspects of Oracle Alta UI design patterns, and by looking at the source code you can learn how to implement each part of it. The application is hosted here so you can play with it.

Here is a quick video that shows you how the application looks and behaves at runtime.

You can get the source for the application from the Oracle ADF Sample Page

Then just extract the zip file, open the jws file with Oracle JDeveloper 12.1.3, and run the index.jsf file in the viewController project. 

Some of the things you'll see in the demo:

• Responsive UI that changes based on screen size or device orientation
• Flow layout implementation 
• New layout components
• The infotile reusable component
• Extending the Alta skin

 You can learn more about Alta UI concepts from this Oracle OpenWorld presentation.

Need more help getting started with Alta? Check out some tips from other developers on our blog feed. 

What are you waiting for? It's time to start implementing the Alta UI in your applications.

We would love to see screenshots of your Alta UI implementations. 

Here’s a question we spent time investigating recently.

We know ADF works well on tablets, but is it suitable for smartphones too?

Sometime back in the JDeveloper 11gR1 and 11gR2 branches (search for ‘tablet’ in those links) of ADF we added a wide range of support for touch gestures, mobile optimizations and more. More recently the Alta skin and UI guidelines contain considerable collateral around building ADF applications to be optimized for tablets.

Yet when you consider a smartphone, say an iPhone over an iPad, or a Nexus 5 vs a Nexus 9, can you still build a usable app for this smaller form factor using ADF?

To prove the point we took the recent Work Better ADF Faces demo app, and reworked some of the screens to see how they would render on an iPhone. You can see the results in the following small recorded demo. The demo shows the app running in a traditional desktop browser, then as comparison in an iOS Simulator browser, and finally just for fun embedded as a remote URL in a MAF application:

So how did we achieve this? The main techniques for achieving this have mostly been blogged before by our staff:

Steven Davelaar’s detailed blog post on getting ADF to run on mobile phones and tablets, where amongst many details Steven discusses adding the metaContainer facet to the af:document tag as follows:

These options allow the pages to scale appropriately to the devices screen size, otherwise you end up with something like this:

Beyond Steven’s copious notes, from here you need to decide do you want to show absolutely everything on the page on a phone, potentially rearranging content or hiding it on a smaller form factor. This starts to probe into the areas of adaptive and responsive design, which is covered by Steven’s post, but also covered by Shay Shmeltzer recently too.

For the sample app at hand, we cut out content, hid some other content, modified some styles and so on, but there really wasn’t any hidden magic to this beyond the techniques above from Steven and Shay.

So while you might consider using MAF to build on-device applications, if you’re comfortable with providing web based solutions instead, you can happily serve content for desktop browsers, tablets and phones.

In case you missed it, one of the most talked about topics at Oracle OpenWorld was the new Oracle Alta UI. There was a lot of buzz around how cool the new Oracle cloud based applications and services user interface is.

Oracle Alta UI is what creates these type of interfaces, and the great news for you is that you can actually start leveraging this immediately in your ADF and MAF development

Oracle Alta UI was officially announced at Oracle OpenWorld - have a read to understand what is about.

All the information you need to start implementing the Oracle Alta UI in your applications is at http://bit.ly/oraclealta 

The Oracle Alta UI is based on four key prinicpals

• Mobile first design
• Simple and uncluttered layouts
• Clear information hierarchy
• Engage users with visual content

If you want to see a quick demo of an ADF Faces Alta based UI see the WorkBetter Alta demo application. And don't forget to also resize the browser window to see how we do responsive design.

We have a page with the basic instructions for turning on Alta in your ADF 12.1.3 applications.

At OOW we also had a technical session about Alta - you can find the slides for it here. 

One thing to keep in mind - while you can turn on the Alta skin for existing applications, to get the full UI experience you should probably start with a re-design of the UI. Remember Alta is not just about the colors - it is about the interaction!

Oracle Developer Cloud Service is a cloud-based software development Platform as a Service (PaaS) and a hosted environment for your application development infrastructure. With the Oracle Developer Cloud Service, development teams can maximize productivity with instant access to Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tooling as well as team collaboration and management utilities in addition to seamless deployment to the Oracle cloud platform. Oracle Developer Cloud Service provides an enterprise-grade platform to develop, collaborate, and deploy applications within the Oracle Cloud with support for on-premise deployment and GitHub integration. It allows businesses to reap all the benefits of PaaS including subscription based, self-service access to reliable, scalable, and elastic cloud environments with the ability to move code seamlessly between Oracle Cloud to other clouds or on-premise. Built in integration from Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE), Oracle JDeveloper and NetBeans allow you to interact with your code in the Oracle Developer Cloud Service.

Get all the details from the Oracle Developer Cloud Service Product Page. 

Be sure to check out the upcoming sessions and hands-on-lab at OOW '14 and JavaOne '14.

Session ID: HOL7064

Session Title: Using Oracle Cloud to Power Your Application Development Lifecycle

Venue/Room: Intercontinental - Sutter

Date/Time: 9/29/14, 11:45 - 12:45

______________________________________________________________________________ 

Session ID: CON1840

Sesstion Title: Java Development in the Cloud

Venue/Room: Hilton - Continental Ballroom 6

Date/Time: 10/1/14, 11:30 - 12:30

______________________________________________________________________________ 

Session ID: CON5031

Session Title: A Guide to Team Development in the Cloud with Oracle Developer Cloud Service

Venue/Room: Moscone South - 270

Date/Time: 10/1/14, 12:45 - 13:30 

______________________________________________________________________________ 

Are you going to be at Oracle OpenWorld this year? If so we have a lot of activities that you should know about.

First and foremost - here is a summary of all the ADF/JDev/MAF activities - this will help you plan your schedule. 

A few things to call out:

Sunday ODTUG and ADF Enterprise Methodology Group User sessions

Continuing the tradition ODTUG with ADF EMG are running back to back ADF/MAF sessions driven by users and experts. You'll find session by book authors and Oracle ACEs  that cover deep technical content - this is a must attend list of session. So remember - for ADF/MAF developers OOW starts early on Sunday!

Tuesday - General Session : Next-Generation Application Development

Chris Tonas who leads the Mobile and Tools development organization at Oracle will give you a sneak peek into some of the cool new things that Oracle has in store for application developers. If you want to know what you'll be doing in the near future - come and check this session out - some cool demos included. 

 Tuesday - ODTUG Oracle Developers Meet-up at Chevy's

Come join your peers for free drinks and lots of networking opportunities in this reception. RSVP today.

Don't forget to use the schedule builder today to pre-register to sessions and labs to guarantee your space in the room. Beyond the ADF/MAF labs you should also check out some of our Cloud labs - specifically the Developer Cloud Service and Mobile Cloud Service labs - spaces are running out quickly for those so book early.

And remember to drop by our demo booths at Moscone South - you'll always find a product manager there that will be happy to answer your questions and just hear about what your are doing with our products.

There is a new mobile framework in town - the Oracle Mobile Application Framework (Oracle MAF) has been announced today and is available as an extension to both JDeveloper and Eclipse.

Oracle MAF lets you develop a single application that will run on both iOS and Android devices. It offers a Java based MVC framework that executes in a hybrid container on the various mobile OSs.

This will probably sound familiar to anyone who used Oracle ADF Mobile before, and this won't be surprising.

Oracle MAF is based on the work we did for Oracle ADF Mobile, but it adds many new features and capabilities.

We expect Oracle MAF to be an attractive solution to a larger set of developer extending beyond just the Oracle ADF community.

For those of you who already built Oracle ADF Mobile apps - the great news is that technical migration to Oracle MAF will be trivial - just open your ADF Mobile application in the new Oracle MAF enabled JDeveloper 12.1.3, and JDeveloper will take care of migrating your application to the new framework (you'll notice some new configuration files replacing your old ones for example).

Now you can start enjoying all the new features including new UI components, Cordova Plug-in integration, creating your own components, reusable AMX components, added security capabilities and many more.

Note that the new Oracle MAF has a different licensing model than Oracle ADF Mobile - it doesn't require a WebLogic and ADF license. Oracle MAF is licensed as an independent product and doesn't require any specific backend server. You can license Oracle MAF per named user per app, or per app with unlimited number of end users. (And you will also be able to license Oracle MAF as part of the Oracle Mobile Suite license if you need a complete mobile enabled server infrastructure).

We are looking forward to hear your opinion of the new features in the new framework and how you like the development capabilities we built for it in JDeveloper.

To learn more about Oracle MAF visit - http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/maf

 Happy mobile development!

We are happy to announce the release of the new Oracle ADF 12.1.3 and Oracle JDeveloper 12.1.3 - this version aligns with the release of Fusion Middleware 12.1.3 which also include WebLogic and the SOA Suite.

There are many new features in this version - and you can read all about it in our 12.1.3 new features doc.

A few features to highlights:

Oracle SOA integration - the all new SOA 12.1.3 is now integrated into Oracle JDeveloper 12.1.3 as extensions with many new capabilities. This also include the all new Oracle Service Bus design time features.

Many new ADF Faces components - star rating, dial status meters, deck and transition components - for animated transitions.

New Diagram component - for creating complex diagrams in your browsers 

New Oracle ADF Charts Component Implementation - our chart components have been updated to add many interactive capabilities that are executed on the client. Those include capabilities such as zoom in/out, hiding items, automatic scale adjustment and much more.

Updatable gauges - you can now use gauge component to allow data input and not just read only.

Costume base maps for thematic maps.

Many enhancements to other components.

There are many other updates to the core IDE and ADF layers.

In addition you'll see enhancements to the overall development experience with improved editors and wizards.

So what are you waiting for?

Take Oracle JDeveloper 12.1.3 for a spin - free download. 

Here are some videos that highlight some of the new features:

New Features in ADF Data Visualizations

New Features in ADF Faces 

ADF Data Visualizations Diagram Layout Tutorial

Cool Demos to try out with the new DVT components

Are you an ADF Developer (Oracle ADF/Oracle Mobile Framework)? If so, please submit your solution to the 2014 Oracle Excellence Awards and if you're selected as a winner, you will receive a free pass to OOW 2014! Oracle once again announces the call for nominations for the 2014 Oracle Excellence Awards: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation.  The Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation honor organizations using Oracle Fusion Middleware to deliver unique business value. This year, the awards will recognize customers across nine distinct categories:

• Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud
• Oracle Cloud Application Foundation
• Oracle Service-Oriented Architecture
• Business Process Management
• Oracle WebCenter
• Oracle Identity Management
• Oracle Data Integration
• Oracle Development Tools and Framework
• Big Data and Business Analytics

If you consider yourself a pioneer with Oracle Development Tools (Oracle ADF/Oracle Mobile Framework) and you're using these solutions in innovative ways to achieve significant business value, submit your nomination for the 2014 Oracle Excellence Awards for Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation in the category of "Oracle Development Tools and Framework" by Tuesday, June 20th, 2014, for a chance to win a FREE registration to Oracle OpenWorld 2014 (September 28-October 2) in San Francisco, California. Top customers will be showcased at Oracle Open World 2014, get a chance to mingle with Oracle executives, network with their peers and be featured in Oracle Publications.

For additional details, go here

In November of 2013 we hosted a multi-track virtual developer day dedicated to Oracle ADF.

With thousands of attendees and live question and answers with product managers, this has been a great success.

But for those who weren't able to tune in for the live event, we now offer the session on-demand on youtube,

Everything from an introduction to Oracle ADF to advanced tuning and debugging and from JDeveloper to Eclipse to Mobile.

Check out these play lists:

Track 1: Introduction to Oracle ADF (click to view playlist)

Track 2: Advanced ADF Topics (click to view playlist) 

Track 3: Oracle ADF Mobile (click to view playlist)

Track 4: Oracle ACEs on ADF (click to view playlist) 

Check out the content and let us know what you think.

With budget cuts all over the world less and less developers get to travel to conferences. So how do you keep up with the latest technical aspects of your development environment? Oracle to the rescue with our Virtual Developer Day.

 We are happy to announce the 2013 Oracle ADF Virtual Developer Days

Online sessions that include a live Q&A with product managers that will cover everything you need to know about Oracle ADF - all from the comfort of your office chair.

With sessions that cover best practices, tuning, mobile, Eclipse support and even some getting started information there is something in this day for every level of experience with Oracle ADF - you are sure to learn some new things too!

Sessions are delivered by Oracle product managers with a special track delivered by expert customers covering some advanced topics.

Check out the schedule and register for the event in your time zone.

If you are an Oracle ADF developer you should start planning on attending Oracle OpenWorld this year NOW!

We are lining up a great set of seminars that aim to provide new technical content to both the novice and the expert developer. A live complete list of Oracle ADF activities at OOW is here.

At last count there are close to 40 sessions focusing on Oracle ADF in the conference this year.

That's about 7 sessions every day for you attend - and that is not counting all the other topics that Oracle OpenWorld covers and that can be relevant to your daily work.

Some of the highlights of the event include:

Special Sunday user forum presented by ODTUG in collaboration with the Oracle ADF Enterprise Methodology Group. Featuring back to back sessions by experts in the community covering best practices and new techniques. Read more here.

(And also don't miss the ADF EMG get together that Oracle sponsors on Saturday night).

Monday will feature a keynote by Chris Tonas who leads the Oracle Java Development Tools organization giving a state-of-the-union overview of where we are and where we are going next.

Multiple hands-on labs - covering ADF Mobile, Data Visualization Components, ADF in Eclipse and more.

Demo ground where you can come and ask your questions and get answers directly from the product management team.

Lots of sessions covering everything from the "how to get started" through in-depth technical topics all the way to best practices and architecture tips.

Of course there are also the usual set of Oracle OpenWorld parties, with the Wed evening appreciation event featuring both Maroon 5 and The Black Keys. More about that show here.

Together with the great networking opportunities with your peers and with Oracle ACEs and Oracle personal, this is indeed becoming a must-attend event for Oracle ADF professionals.

See you in San Francisco.

With companies tightening their hold on budget, travel & events participation are at the top of the list for cuts. Realizing this, and the fact that we can't get every developer to come and attend one of our physical events, we are happy to offer you the opportunity to participate in our upcoming virtual developer day.

On Wed August 7th, we'll be hosting a full half day virtual conference on Mobile Application Development.

Focusing on developing iOS and Android applications with Java and Oracle ADF Mobile, this day will cover everything from considerations for choosing a mobile platform, architecture overview of Oracle's hybrid mobile solution, to deep dive into the building blocks of Oracle ADF Mobile and how you build applications with them. We'll close the day with a guided hands-on lab.

 You are invited to join us for free. Get a half day training that will transform you to become a mobile developer.

Click here to sign up.

Here is the agenda