Browse Category by Alta UI

ADF 12.2.1: Using the Theme Editor

A couple of weeks ago Oracle released ADF 12.2.1 with many cool features and one of them is the Theme Editor. With this new tool you can change the look and feel of you application by selecting the desired style of the components and see the changes automatically right in the browser. This tool can help developers who are not experts in CSS to build applications with a great look and feel.

We have to make a couple of things in order to use the theme editor.
First we have to create a new application based on an existing EAR file.

The EAR file we are going to use is located inside our 12.2.1 Middleware Home, in my installation this path is:

After that we just have to click on Finish to create the skin editor application.
To start the Theme Editor we have to run that application by runing index.html file.

Once the application is runing we will see this:

We are going to create a new skin so we have to click on ‘Create Theme’ button. A popup will appear where we have to put the name of the theme and also select the skin we want to use. We can choose Skyros or Alta as our base skin.

Click on ‘Save and Close’ and we will have our theme created. By clicking on the right button we can for example edit, delete, duplicate or export our theme. We will come back later to export the theme but at the moment we are going to edit it.
Once you click on edit, we can see some tabs in the top of the page where wecan change property values of some components, and in the bottom of the page we have a real time preview of our skin.
A quick example of what can we do is change our buttons style.

When we have finished our skin work we have to click ok ‘Save and Close’ in the top right of the page.
Now we can use this skin in our application by exporting the theme.
After exporting the skin we can use it by importing the jar file we have just generated in our application.
We also have to select this skin as default skin by selecting it as ‘Default Skin Family’ in ‘ADF View’ menu in project proeprties.

Now if we run the application we can see that the skin that we applied in the theme editor applies to our application.
If we don’t get the look and feel that we expected using the Theme Editor we can also extend the skin we have just created and add our custom CSS rules to skin our application.
You can get more information about the Theme Editor and about using skins in an ADF Library JAR file in these links:

Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit (Oracle JET)

Last Friday was a day with lots of Oracle products releases (Check Oracle ADF 12.2.1 release notes) and Oracle also released one of the most expected products Oracle JavaScript Extension Toolkit, also known as Oracle JET, the new JavaScript Framework.

Oracle JET is targeted at intermediate to advanced JavaScript developers working on client-side applications. It’s a collection of open source JavaScript libraries along with a set of Oracle contributed JavaScript libraries that make it as simple and efficient as possible to build applications that consume and interact with Oracle products and services, especially Oracle Cloud services.

Oracle JET is a framework to develop applications based on some Open Source libraries:

  • JQuery

JQuery is a JavaScript library that help us to simplify the way to interact with HTML files, manipulate DOM tree and handle events.

  • JQuery UI

JQuery UI is a components library build on top of JQuery that offer us different widgets and allow us to interact easily with them (resize, drag and drop, etc). We can also add those components transitions and effects.

  • Knockout

Knockout is a library that allow us to create responsive interfaces with a clean underlying data model having a Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) architecture design pattern.

  • RequireJS

RequireJS is more than a library to resolve dependencies  It also provides an asynchronous file and module loader.

  • Hammer
Hammer is an open-source library that can recognize gestures made by touch, mouse and pointer events.

Oracle JET supports MVVM arquitecture pattern (Model-View-ViewModel). In this architecture the Model represents the application data, the View is the presentation of the data and the ViewModel exposes the data from the model to the View.

 

Oracle JET Common Model and Collection API implements Model layer. This API has the following JavaScripts objtects:

  • oj.Model: Represents one single record from a data service such as a RESTful service.
  • oj.Collection: It is a list of oj.Model objects.
  • oj.Events: Provides methods to handle events.
  • oj.KnockoutUtils: Provides methods for mapping the attributes from oj.Model and oj.Collection object to Knockout observable objects for use with components view models
Oracle JET provides a collection of components wrapped as JQuery UI Widgets to implement View layer. These components range from a basic button or input to advanced visualization components like charts.  

The last layer, ViewModel is implemented by Knockout.js, and offers us two-way data binding between View and Model layers.

Oracle JET also has a lot of more features like these:

  • A validation framework that offers components level validation and data conversion
  • A cache at the Model layer for performance optimization of the pagination.
  • Connection to data sources through web services such as REST services or WebSockets.
  • Integrated authorization through OAuth 2.0 for data models retrieved from REST services.

Oracle has also provided us some resources so we can start building an application and learning Oracle JET.

  • Oracle JET application demo

  • Cookbook

In the cookbook we can see all Oracle JET components and also the HTML and JavaScript code needed to make it work,

 
You can also edit HTML and JavaScript code in the cookbook and see the changes at the moment.

If you are interested in the framework and want to learn more you should visit these links:

Oracle JET Website
Oracle JET Developers Guide
Oracle JET Youtube channel

It has been a long wait, but ADF 12.2.1 has been released

One year and a half after the last Oracle ADF 12c version (12.1.3), last Friday Oracle released Oracle ADF 12.2.1. This release is part of a major Oracle Fusion Middleware release, including WebLogic Server 12c, SOA 12c and WebCenter 12c.
If you want to use MAF you will still have to use JDeveloper 12.1.3.

As we were so much time without a new release, Oracle ADF 12.2.1 brings us lots of new features and also a lot of bugs fixed. These are some of them:

  • Java SE 8

JDeveloper 12.2.1 runs on JDK8 and provides development support for JDK8.

  • JCS and DCS integration

We are now able to integrate JDeveloper with Java Cloud Service and Developer Cloud Service.

  • Alta Skin

Alta UI is not a new feature, but this is the new default skin in every ADF application instead of Skyros. There is also a new Oracle Alta UI website where you can find some advices and a demo.

  • Theme Editor

We also have a new feature that will help developers who don’t have a lot of knowledge in CSS to build and edit a skin.

  • Masonry Layout

Masonry Layout help us to build responsive pages that will automatically adjust its children to fit the available space. There is also a new three columns responsive template.

  • DVT components iimprovements

Some components that were already available have been improved such as Funnels and Pie Charts. Polar coordinate system is also now supported by some types such as bar, line, bubble, etc.

We have also a new component ‘NBox’ that is usually used to compare data across two dimensions, for example to compare employees performance.


If you want to know more about the new version, the full list of improvements or know all the bugs that has been fixed click on this link.