Building a Live Twitter Portlet in 5 minutes

John Brunswick from Oracle demonstrates how easy it is to build a Twitter portlet and consume it in Oracle WebCenter without writing a single line of code.

In this easy to follow youtube video John walks us through the steps end-to-end, covering in detail how to:

• Consume an XML feed in Oracle JDeveloper
• Generate the XSD using JDeveloper
• Create an ADF URL data control
• Visualize the Twitter data as a table on a new JSF page
• Expose the JSF page as a standards-based portlet (JSR 168/WSRP 2.0)
• Register the WSRP 2.0 portlet producer with WebCenter
• Drop the Twitter portlet onto a WebCenter page using Oracle Composer

JDeveloper 11g R1 Patch Set 1: Hundreds of New Features

Most of the WebCenter new features in PS1 are pretty fundamental, complex big ticket items. On the JDeveloper/ADF side, however, there are literally hundreds of new features.

Here are the ones on top of my list:

Simplified and improved creation and management of contextual events (contextual events are used for inter-component communication):

• Create an ADF contextual event from a faces button, managed bean or JavaScript as well as from any ADF value binding, action binding or navigator binding.
• Edit contextual events using the new contextual events tab in the bindings editor.
• Declaratively specify raise conditions for an event.
• Pass a binding value, data control method return, managed bean method return value, string literal or other expression as an event payload.
• Choose to subscribe to an event only if it’s raised by a particular component.
• Declaratively specify handle conditions for an event.

Improved Design time experience: JSF visual editor and design time EL execution:

• Improved feedback on drop zones
• Clearer presentation of the name of the object under cursor
• Significant performance improvements
• Improved ability to work with components that can be collapsed (ShowDetailItem)
• EL that is resolvable at design time now renders in the visual editor. New options for handling EL that cannot be resolved at design time include: hide the EL completely, show dummy data, show the EL (either in full or abbreviated form).

JSON Support: New support for editing JSON files, including creating new JSON files, syntax highlighting, structure pane, brace matching, and code folding.

New Carousel and Improved Hierarchy Viewer components

Here you find a (more) complete list of new features.

ADF and WebCenter Mashup: Publishing Google Gadgets with Ensemble

With Tom Quigley we just published a new demo showcasing what it takes to publish ADF or WebCenter applications as Google Gadgets. The demo walks you through the simple steps of building an ADF application, exposing it as a Google Gadget with Ensemble, and consuming the gadget in iGoogle.

Hosted ADF Faces Demo

You can take a serious look at the 150 or so JSF view components that ADF offers. We have a hosted demo app that covers skinning, runtime skin selection, and drag and drop capabilities as well. You are one click away from it. Click now! 😉

Oracle JDeveloper and ADF 11g Have Arrived

The very first production pieces of the 11g Fusion Middleware stack are available for download. Now you can start building your very rich Ajax applications with the technology of your choice, including JSF, EJB 3.0, ADF, and Spring, all of which is running on the WebLogic Application Server. Here is the very impressive list of 11g new features.

Important note: This release does not contain any of the SOA and WebCenter capabilities, those are currently scheduled to be released in the first half of 2009.

If you’re a WebCenter customer, or are interested in adding WebCenter capabilities, such as portlets, content integration, runtime customization, threaded discussions, wikis, blogs, tags, links, etc. to your applications, you have two options to choose from:

1. Start building your application using the 10.1.3.x release of JDeveloper, ADF, and Oracle Webcenter. This is nothing new, this option has been around ever since WebCenter 10.1.3.2 was released.
   Pros: You can consume content and portlets in applications today.
   Cons: You don’t have the richness of the 11g ADF-Faces components. Also, you’ll have to go through a migration process to get your applications from 10.1.3.x to 11.
2. Use the newly released JDeveloper and ADF 11g to build the model and the ADF view layers of your application, and inject the WebCenter and SOA parts when they become available.
   Pros: You can use the full power of the new ADF-Faces components, and the greatly improved JDeveloper right away, deployed to WebLogic Server.
   Cons: No SOA or WebCenter functionality available yet.

In addition to weighing the importance of the capabilities mentioned above, you’ll also have to take your time lines (development, test/stage, production) into account.

ADF Methodology – Unconference Session

Unconference sessions provide yet another great way to hear/learn from experts, as well as to contribute to share your experience. Here is the list of unconference sessions at this year’s OpenWorld.

The keeps changing and growing, but from today’s snapshot the ADF Methodology and the Enterprise 2.0 ones sound really interesting.

When and Where?

Moscone West 3rd Floor:
Monday, Sep 22, Overlook I: Overlook I: Enterprise 2.0: What is is, and how you’ll fail. (by Brian “Bex” Huff)
Wednesday, Sep 24, Overlook I: ADF Methodology Workgroup (Lead: Chris Muir)