I decided to use this simple application as my launching point into ADF. The first app is a simple page with a parent level to the left and a child area to the center. I followed the following guide http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/obe11jdev/bulldog/ria_application/developriaapplication_long.htm
A few simple notes to make your life easier
Select where you want the object to go on the page first by clicking in that spot. Say we want to add a grid to the right panel. Well I would click on the right panel first. then I would go to the ADF Faces list on the right side column in JDeveloper and select the grid. That will place a grid in the right panel where I wanted it. This will be hard to get use to since we are use to the drag and drop world.
When you compile and run it may take a while for the IE window to open and you will see lots of red in the console pane at the bottom of your Jdeveloper screen. Its not a big deal- remember red is a good color now. Whats happening is its launching weblogic on your box as a web server. So it looks like in the ADF world you can do development while not connected to the network (as long as you have all of your data sources). JDeveloper also has the ability to create mock DB services so you can create an app on your local client with no database. Jdeveloper is also a resource hog so makesure you have atleast 2gb of ram, trust me, that also means my 4 year old laptop is starting to show its age.
It seems like its more steps than creating an app within PeopleSoft. Well it is. there are a few things that PS did for us that JDeveloper does not. We have to import in a data source. And we have to format the page our selves, its more flexible than the PS pages we are use to. Also when we run the app we go directly to the page, it seems that security is not integrated from the start for our apps and may need to be connected later on. Also one big difference is that there isn’t a generic site we log into and navigate to our page. So the entire idea of menu navigation does not exist on our simple app at this point. But there is a good reason for that. Our ADF pages in Fusion Applications are for exception handling. So if you watch the oracle OpenWorld key note you will see how the system emails functional users when they need to be involved and it sends them a link to the page. Remember our old 80/20 rule we used with our clients. The same thing applies here, our pages will most likely be used for the 20% who need some sort of manual intervention.
A few UI observations
On top of the grid there is a row of text boxes. This is oracles Query by Example. it allows us to filter the collection by just adding text inside of one or more of those boxes. This is just one use of AJAX inside of the app where the entire page does not have to refresh to show the result set.
The detach button basically hides the rest of the page and expands the gird. The little arrows between the sections of the page also collapse and open up more work space.
