Oracle Fusion Applications are on the move. They were demonstrated at Oracle Open World 2009, they are current being tested with dozens if not hundreds of organizations and they have been promised for general availability later in 2010. Screenshots of selected modules are available on the internet, for example at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/oracleopenworld09/sets/72157622462805751/.

Fusion Applications are of interest to any ADF developer, as Oracle teams have worked hard – in close collaboration with the ADF development teams – to come up with UI patterns, ways of leading the end user through the application, presenting data and currently available actions in intuitive or at least consistent ways that would most likely work for most of our applications as well. And since we have the same technology stack at our disposal as the Fusion Apps teams have, we can see whether their best practices work for us too.

A recent addition to the catalog of ADF Faces components was the contextInfo component. It is quite heavily used in Fusion Apps for one such consistent pattern. The next screenshot illustrates this component:

The little orange markers in the upper lefthand corner of the Project Name fields – that is the manifestation of the contextInfo component. The popup you see for Stark Industries BI Rollout is the effect of activating the component. And it demonstrates its purposed rather nicely and effectively: whenever the user sees a contextInfo marker (the little oracle square) she knows that additional information associated with that field is available. The user can click on the marker and the context information is presented in whatever way the developer feels is most appropriate, though usually a popup will be used.

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