Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged customization
Book Review: Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook by Yannick Ongena
Nov 13th
A few months back, in August, I received an electronic copy of the book: “Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 Administration Cookbook” by Yannick Ongena (Packt Publishing, 2011). I promised you then you write a review on it and now I finally deliver on that promise.
Main conclusion: if you want to get started with WebCenter 11g, this book will help you take your first steps on many of the most important areas of Web Center (Portal). The recipes in the book provide clear instructions on getting things going. Where the Web Center documentation can be a little overwhelming – the Web Center Developer’s Guide has 69 chapters and presumably over 1500 pages of content – Yannick’s book is clear, straightforward and easy to follow.
I am not exactly sure about the intended reader for the book. The title and Yannick’s introduction mention Administration and a technical person responsible for administration. Many recipes however discusses topics and tasks I would associate with developers. So presumably both administrators and developers will benefit from the book. Note that the traditional roles of developer, administrator and end user are not as clearly defined with Web Center Portal: business or end users can take a lot of control over the portalat run time, potentially performing tasks traditionally associated only with developers. However, many run time activities are probably to complex for ordinary business users – so a technically skilled person who is typically active at run time in the run time environment is looked at to help out. In comes the administrator. Even though that may not be the usual Middleware Administrator turned DBA but more of a portal & content administrator. Well, that is for each organization itself to figure out. The persons responsible for creating the WebCenter portal, editing it at run time and taking care of its infrastructure and environment will all benefit from this book.
WebCenter 11gR1 PS3 – Design Time at Run Time with a Vengeance – introducing run time Data Controls and Data Visualizations
Jan 16th
The concept of design time @ run time that empowers application administrators and even end users to influence the application after it has been deployed has been gaining traction over the last few years. Bit by bit, run time customization facilities have made their way into Fusion Middleware. In the form of the SOA Composer, the BPM Process Composer, custom customization in ADF and various WebCenter features – most prominently the Composer framework.
The recent 11gR1 Patch Set 3 release has brought design time @ run time to the next level. In terms of functional richness as well as ease of use. Design Time at Run Time enables run time application administrators to not only change the layout of existing pages as well as add new content – static HTML or live Portlets -, but also to create new pages, edit the navigation structure of the application, change component properties and skin-attributes, create data controls and create and edit taskflows. Many of the application aspects that until recently were the sole discretion of the application developer are now available at runtime to privileged users. All in aid of agility and quick time to market.
This article gives a very rapid demonstration of the creation of a new WebCenter Portal application with only default content. This application is deployed in the Integrated WebLogic Server. At run time, a new page is created as well as a new Data Control for Employee from the EMP table in the SCOTT database schema. A table visualization of the Employees is added – still at run time – to this dynamically created page.
This next screenshot is of a page that did not exist when the application was deployed, with a table component that was created at run time through a data control that was also configured after deployment.
OOW 2009: Castle in the Clouds: SaaS-Enabling Oracle ADF Faces Applications
Oct 12th
It will be my last presentation at Oracle Open World 2009 – how to turn any ADF application into a SaaS application – an application suitable for deployment ‘on the cloud – available to users from different organizations’. One of my statements is that most if not all applications benefit from applying those same SaaS concepts. It makes applications running within the walls of an enterprise more agile, more manageable, better suited to the specific needs of individual users and user groups and easier to integrate in the IT landscape of the enterprise, both at the services level (SOA, ESB) and at the user interface level (Portlet). The presentation will discuss a number of facilities and characteristics that are desirable in SaaS applications as well as other Web Applications.
If you are interested in attending and watching the live demos, please come to the session: S307483 Castle in the Clouds: SaaS-Enabling Oracle ADF Faces Applications (Wednesday 14th October, Time: 11:45 – 12:45, Marriott Hotel, Salon 3).
ADF 11g – persisted run time user UI personalization or: Impatient man’s MDS
Jan 9th
One of the rather cool pieces of functionality that did not make it into the JDeveloper 11g Boxer release of early October 2008 is the Meta Data Service or MDS and especially its capability to store and reapply user created personalizations of the User Interface across sessions. Some simple examples of what this means: ADF 11g Rich Client Components allow users to manipulate the state of components – such as the position of the separator in the PanelSplitter, the ordering and width of Table Columns, the initially visible tab or accordion child etc.. Through MDS, these changes are captured and stored for th duration of the session (if so desired), which means that when the user returns to a page thus ‘personalized’, the component will not assume their default state as specified in the JSF page at design time by the developer, but rather the state that user specified. Eventually MDS will persist these component personalizations across sessions – but not right now. That means that at the present when a user starts a new session, all components are presented in their default state.
In this article I will describe two things: Change Persistency for all attributes – not just the built-in settings that can be manipulated through the components and Persisting the changes across sessions, even with the current release of JDeveloper, ADF and MDS.
