Development

One of the new features introduced in a recent monthly update of Oracle Developer Cloud Service is the advanced code search box you can see at the top right when you look at your Git repositories. This is a separate search functionality from the regular project artifacts search the box does in the other section of DevCS.

This search functionality is language aware, supporting a variety of languages including Java, JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It scans and indexes your code to understand its structure. DevCS can then do context aware searches for objects in your code, providing you autosuggest and even supporting camelCasing in the search box.

In the short video below I show you how this works. I start by importing code from a random github project into DevCS - and then I perform a search and show you how to find out the files, lines of code & revision references to your search term. You'll also see how code navigation works in the browser.

For more information about this capability have a look at the documentation here.

The most popular blog entry on my blog has been the "How do I start Learning ADF" entry for years now. That entry however was last updated in 2012 (and written in 2010) - so I figured it is time to give it another update, point to more recent resources, fix broken links, and cover additional resources that appeared over the years.

So here is the ADF 12c version of that blog entry updated for 2017:

Oracle ADF aims to reduce the amount of coding you need to do for a lot of the tasks you'll need for building an application, and if you follow some of the tutorials mentioned later you'll see how you can build advanced apps without coding. But, at the end of the day, you will write code when developing with ADF - and that code would be written in Java. You don't have to be a Java ninja to work in ADF, but you should be familiar with basic language concepts and constructs.

There are lots of resources out there that will teach you the language (by the way if you are on ADF 12.2.* you should learn the Java/JDK 8 syntax), one option is the Oracle Java Tutorials path. Searching online you'll be able to find many other resources for this task. Since Oracle ADF is based on Java EE architecture - you might want to also get a bit of understanding of that architecture - but don't worry about learning all of Java EE in details - ADF will make it much simpler for you.

While learning the language you should be practicing it with the development tool that you are going to use, if you are going to developer Oracle ADF applications then that tool will be Oracle JDeveloper. Get yourself familiar with the basic IDE features for coders by running through this IDE tutorial.

Now that you know the basics of the Java language (and maybe some Java EE concepts), it's time to start using the framework that will simplify your life. Start by reading the data sheet and technical paper to understand what ADF is all about.

Now get your hands dirty by completing the Overview tutorial for Oracle ADF - this will take you a couple of hours but by the end of it you'll have built a full blown application, and you will touch on most of the parts of the Oracle ADF architecture.

Two other tutorials you should do next will deepen your knowledge about the Oracle ADF Controller Layer and taskflows, and the Oracle ADF Faces UI layer. If you got more time, have a run through other tutorials from our site.

Now that you have hands-on experience with Oracle ADF, it would be a good point to go and get some deeper knowledge about how the framework works. You can leverage the collection of free online lessons we recorded in the ADF Essentials channel. You don't have to watch all the videos, but I would definitely recommend that at a minimum you'll watch the overview, ADF business components, ADF Controller (both parts) and ADF Faces video. And then you must watch the video about the ADF bindings internal seminars (2 parts) - these are critical for you to understand the inner working of the ADF "magic layer" that makes development so simple. 

By the way if you prefer to get knowledge through live or online instructor-lead courses or by reading books - we have those too - see the list here.

Ok, now you have a good grasp of the framework and how it works, it might be a good time to read the manual for Oracle ADF - "Developing Fusion Web Applications with Oracle Application Development Framework". This is the complete guide and you should read it to get more insight into the framework, best practices, and general guidelines. Note that the ADF documentation libraries has additional books about ADF Faces, ADF Desktop Integration, Administration guides and more.

Now that you know how to build ADF apps, it's time to learn how to architect more complex projects and work in a team environment. The resource to learn from is the ADF Architecture Square - where we discuss best practices, development guidelines, and most importantly how to architect a complete complex application. Here you can find docs and also a link to a set of videos on the ADF Architecture Square YouTube Channel. If you only have time to watch one video from that channel - go for the "Angels in the ADF Architecture". By the way, if you are looking for a platform for your team to collaborate on while building Oracle ADF applications - check out the Oracle Developer Cloud Service and the integration it provides with JDeveloper.

As you continue on your development road, there will be times when you'll want to know "How do I do X?" or "Why do I get this error?". The nice thing is that since many other developers are working with ADF, you can leverage their collective knowledge. Got a question - type it into google and it is likely that you'll find blog entries and youtube videos that explain how to solve your issue.

A great place to search for answers is the indexed collection of ADF and JDeveloper blog articles. Search by keywords or topics and you'll likely get great samples to help you achieve your task.

Still can't find the answer? Ask your question on our ADF community forum, just don't forget to follow the basic rules of asking questions on the forum.

Things keep evolving in the world of Oracle ADF, so to keep up to speed you should follow JDeveloper on Twitter for the latest news.

Over the years Oracle ADF has proven itself to be a great framework for enterprise applications, and each new release introduced further capabilities and simplifications - If you are just now joining the world of Oracle ADF you are in for a great ride. Have fun.

• Develop, Rinse, Repeat
• Test Until Your Five Year Old Can Do It
• Human Intervention Creates Human Error- Automate EVERYTHING.
• How the shorter development cycle build business success.
• How the DBA can do more with less.

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We’ll demo different scenarios surrounding DevOps, virtualization and how to make the DBA pivotal to DevOps success.

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Kellyn Pot’Vin-Gorman is a member of the Oak Table Network and an Oracle ACE Director alumna. She is the Technical Intelligence Manager for the Office of CTO at Delphix, a company recognized for it's impressive virtualization and data masking environment capabilities. Kellyn is known for her extensive work with multi-database platforms, cloud migrations, virtualization, the command line interface, environment optimization tuning, automation and architecture design. Her blog, http://dbakevlar.com and social media activity under her handle, DBAKevlar is well respected for her insight and content.

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Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service (ABCS) gives you a great way to build apps that track data, but what if your data is also involved in processes? What if you need to automate not just the data collection but also the human workflow interactions? The new integration between Oracle ABCS and Oracle Process Cloud Service (PCS) enables you to achieve this easily.

You can now create processes that are associated with ABCS business objects and interact with them directly from your Oracle ABCS user interfaces. This is a two way interaction patterns, where PCS processes can access information from Oracle ABCS business objects, and ABCS user interfaces can be created on top of these PCS processes to initiate and progress processes.

In the video example below I'm developing a basic approval flow for travel requests. The video will show you how the integration works covering:

• Associating a process with a business object
• Accessing the business object values from your process
• Setting security and connection between PCS and ABCS
• Initiating PCS processes from an ABCS page
• Creating custom to-do list pages in ABCS to show you your tasks
• Creating custom task details pages in ABCS to progress tasks

As you'll see, all of these are quite simple and completely declarative to achieve with the visual development approach.

The combination of the products provide great value to the users of each one of those. PCS customers will love the ability to persist the data they use in their processes, and the ability to design even richer interfaces and reports. ABCS users will love the ability to automate and manage long running complex processes. 

One of the new features of Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service (ABCS) in the May 2017 release is integration with Oracle JET's Composite Components Architecture (JET CCA).

Based on the Web Components standard, JET CCA provides a way to define reusable UI components (with logic) that can easily be incorporated into multiple applications.

The new feature in ABCS allows you to pick such components as extensions to the ABCS design time, providing an easy standard way to extend your UI capabilities. For example in the screenshot below you see a new slider component in the common components section, and how it looks like when added to the visual designer.

In this blog entry we'll start by creating a very simple JET CCA component and then see how to add it to Oracle ABCS. (Thanks goes to John Brock who helped get this sample working).

To learn more about JET CCA have a look at their developer guide, and the sample in the Oracle JET Cookbook. We are going to start from that sample and build a very basic component. (For a deep guided tour of Oracle JET CCA check out Duncan's series of JET CCA blogs)

There are 5 files needed to define a component.

We'll start with the loader.js file - this file provides info on the other files involved in the component. Note that in the sample we are registering "slider" as the name of the component, in this file we are also indicating which jet components we are going to use and including them in the define section. Specifically we are adding the ojs/ojslider component here.

The next file we'll create is the component.json file. This file describes the meta data about our component. One of the key things you can define here is a set of properties that users of the components can set when they add it to their application. The nice thing in the ABCS integration is that these will show up at design time as properties in the visual editor.

In our component we are defining four properties that control the title, minimum, maximum, and actual value of a slider. Note that right now ABCS is using Oracle JET 2.3 and we need to specify this in the file.

Next we'll define the html file (demo-cca.html) that includes our UI. We are using regular HTML code here along with knockout.js binding of properties to values. You can use the $props prefix to refer to values of attributes we defined in the components.json file.

<div data-bind="text: 'Title: '+$props.title"></div>
  <input id="slider-id"
     data-bind="ojComponent: {
            component: 'ojSlider',
            max:$props.max,
            min:$props.min,
            step:10,
            value:$props.value
            }"/>
             

Next there is a css file - controlling the look and feel of the component. Since we are not doing any customization on the look and feel we'll create an empty file called demo-cca.css.

Next is the model file (demo-cca.js) - this file contains data and logic that can be accessed from the component. We'll create a basic file without any logic code in it.

Now that you have created the 5 files - simply zip them into a single zip file. This zip file is the file you'll give to your component users. In this case to the ABCS developer.

Go into your Application Settings -> Extensions in Oracle ABCS and choose to create a new UI component from zip file. Upload the zip file you just created. Then make sure to enable the component using the boolean control on the page.

Switch over to the UI Designer and you'll see that there is a new component in the component palette.
Drag and drop it into your page - and you'll see the HTML code. Set the properties in the property inspector and you'll see them influencing the content of your page.
You can also bind the properties to the values of fields in your custom business objects.

In the latest version of Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service (ABCS) that we rolled out at the beginning of May we introduced a set of new code templates for creating Business Object Providers.

Business Object Providers - or BOPs for short - are a mechanism that allow you to extend ABCS and have it access external REST sources of data. In the video below I'm going to show you how to use the most basic template provided for BOPs - which allows you to create a read only BOP.

The template has 2 files that you need to change - one (RESTOperationProvider.js) that has the code for accessing the REST service and reading the results, and the other (RESTEntityProvider.js) has the code that defines the structure of the object you are creating.

In the video I'm using this URL - https://api.github.com/users/Oracle/repos - that gets you a list of projects/repositories that Oracle owns on Github:

Once you created a BOP you can add a new "external service" to your application in the data designer, and then you can use that object like you would any other.

Check it out:

This quick one is based on a customer question about Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service. The scenario is that we have a business object that has a field that contains the URL to an image. We want to be able to show that image on a page in Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service.

To do that I add a custom UI component object to the details (or edit) page of a record - then I switched the HTML of that object to be: <img id="logoimg"/>

I then added a button to the page and added a bit of custom JavaScript code in its action as follow:

var img = document.getElementById('logoimg'); img.src=$Company.getValue('Logo'); resolve();

This code simply locates the custom object on the page using the object id and then sets the src property of the img html tag to match the value of the field in the business object.

This happens every several years, our blogging platform at Oracle is switching to a new environment, and my blog is one of those moving. In the next few days I'll be testing to see if content migration did its magic and everything works.

If you run into any broken entries/links/samples please drop me a line or just comment on the specific blog entry, and I'll try to fix things.

This quick one is based on a customer question about Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service. The scenario is that we have a business object that has a field that contains the URL to an image. We want to be able to show that image on a page in Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service.

To do that I add a custom UI component object to the details (or edit) page of a record - then I switched the HTML of that object to be: <img id="logoimg"/>

I then added a button to the page and added a bit of custom JavaScript code in its action as follow:

var img = document.getElementById('logoimg');

img.src=$Company.getValue('Logo');

resolve();

This code simply locates the custom object on the page using the object id and then sets the src property of the img html tag to match the value of the field in the business object.

This quick one is based on a customer question about Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service. The scenario is that we have a business object that has a field that contains the URL to an image. We want to be able to show that image on a page in Oracle Application Builder Cloud Service.

To do that I add a custom UI component object to the details (or edit) page of a record - then I switched the HTML of that object to be: <img id="logoimg"/>

I then added a button to the page and added a bit of custom JavaScript code in its action as follow:

var img = document.getElementById('logoimg');

img.src=$Company.getValue('Logo');

resolve();

This code simply locates the custom object on the page using the object id and then sets the src property of the img html tag to match the value of the field in the business object.