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

WebCenter Development Environment – Minimum and Recommended Requirements

The other day a question was posted on the Oracle WebCenter Suite Group on LinkedIn about the minimum and recommended requirements for the WebCenter development environment.

Before considering what the actual hardware requirements are, it makes sense to quickly glance through what we mean by the development environment, what needs to be installed, and what are the things you can do. In addition, you should also consider what back-end servers are needed and whether those are required or optional.

To make it easier, here is a slide that gives a high-level overview of the WebCenter development environment (click on it to enlarge it).

First, you have to install JDeveloper with the WebCenter Extension (through Help > Check for Updates). This will allow you to do a lot of things, including:

• build customizable applications with Composer
• build, deploy, and test JSR 168 portlets
• consume WSRP 1.0 and WSRP 2.0 portlets
• integrate content from your file system (for development and testing purposes)
• test search

In addition, most enterprises have an IMAP or MS Exchange Email server hosted, that you can connect to and integrate into your applications.

If you need social computing services, such as discussions, wikis, blogs, you need to install the back-end servers for these services. If you would like to leverage people connection, tagging, linking, you will need a DB.

Now, to get to the original question: what is the minimum/ideal requirement to run all this: if all you need to run is JDeveloper with the WebCenter extension, 2GB RAM should be sufficient. If you want to fire up an XE database on your laptop, and want to run multiple browsers with email and MS Office on it, you should have 4GB RAM (and ideally an O/S that can see all of it). As for hard disk: JDeveloper requires somewhat more than 1GB, and the WebCenter Extension is in the 200MB range. So you can count with 2GB as the absolute minimum.

Last but not least, a monitor with good resolution, possibly an external monitor (or two) doesn’t hurt either.

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.

New WebCenter Extension for JDeveloper Fixes Design Time Memory Issues

There’s a new WebCenter Extension available that you can install very quickly and easily through JDeveloper’s Help > Check for Update. To confirm that the new version is installed, check the extension version through Help > About. Look for extension version: 11.1.1.1.0.090820.0735.

The updated extension contains fixes for a number of issues; most importantly the incorrect MaxPermSize setting that the WebCenter Extension injected on the project level. This value caused conflicts with the Integrated WebLogic Server settings specified in the SetDomainEnv shell script.

As a result of this fix you will not run out of memory after a few runs of your WebCenter application.

Regardless of whether you do or don’t have the WebCenter Extension already installed, it is safe to install the new version.

Bonus: if you want to download the extension offline and install it off of your file system, here you can get a hold of all the Oracle Fusion Middleware extensions, including the SOA Composite Editor and the Team Productivity Center.
Important note: If you choose to download the WebCenter extension from OTN directly, be sure that you DO NOT extract the extension zip file. Point JDeveloper’s Help > Check for Update to the downloaded zip file directly.

Isn’t it nice to see the JDeveloper extension model work when quick fixes need to be released?

REST with JDeveloper 11g

Lucas Jellema from AMIS has a very interesting post about his experience with REST and JDeveloper 11g. He walks through the RestLet tutorial using the recently released JDeveloper 11g.

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.

Oracle JDeveloper 11g Announced

In the Developer Keynote Ted Farrell announced Oracle JDeveloper 11g and ADF 11g. The release date is October 1. While this release doesn’t contain full SOA and WebCenter capabilities, the production version of JDeveloper and ADF allows you to get started with actual development. As the SOA and WebCenter pieces become available you can easily add them to your ADF applications.

Packed WebCenter Hands-On Session

Quick update: the first WebCenter Hands-On session that I mentioned earlier this week was full today. We have 2 more sessions on Tuesday, if you missed it on Sunday.

Tuesday, September 23, 11:30am-12:30pm, Marriott, Golden Gate C1
Tuesday, September 23, 5:30pm-6:30pm, Marriott, Golden Gate C1

Hope to see you there!

JDeveloper 10.1.3.4 Available for Download

As announced on Shay’s blog, the “brand new” version of JDeveloper 10g is available for download. It comes with a couple of dozen bug fixes on the JSF view and ADF BC front. From the WebCenter side fixes range from content management (Universal Content Management – fka: Stellent), to WSRP interoperability (for consuming portlets produced by Web Logic Portal) and several upgrade related bugs.

As always, the Studio Edition comes with the WebCenter extension installed.