A few moments ago, Ted Farrell completed his demonstration of ADF 11g – the premier framework for developing rich, multi-channel applications. In 30 minutes he ran the audience through an impressive range of features and functions that his team has developed in ADF 11g, both for the Oracle Fusion Applications development groups to make use of but also fully available to any customer around the world. He focused today on rich data visualization and multi-channel support.
This article provides a quick overview of the demo scenario and provides some screenshots to go with it.
Ted started out with the ‘normal’ web application that in this particular case of a Car Insurer is customer facing. It has a number of rich, appealing featurs such as the carousel component.
The application is used by a car policy holder to file a claim for her fairly fancy car. The application walks the policy holder through the flow of filing that claim, including a visual indication of the location of the damage on the car as well as the location on a map of where the incident took place.
The hierarchical viewer is used to drill down into a specific type of claim-procedure:
The new Thematic Map component (part of the 11g PS 3 release?) can draw and interact with any polygon- like airplane seating area of building layout. In this case it is used to show the picture of the car and allow the end user to select the area on the car that was damaged. This indication can be turned into the structured data that this picture was drawn from.
The Map component is used to allow the end user to select the location where the car got damaged.
It is impressive how Ted walks the audience through a fairly complicated, (largely?) live demo.
Once the claim has been filed, a notification is sent to ‘damage inspector’, via email. This person can receive that email – obviously – on a mobile device
and enter the ADF Mobile Application that runs natively on the device from the email.
The information entered into the web application is presented in the native mobile application – that uses the same underlying data controls as the web application.
and it can also render the Thematic Map with the indication of where the damage was done to the car.
Note that the native mobile application has two special features:
– it can run in disconnected mode, storing any data manipulation done by the user in a local SQLLite database that will automatically synchronize with the backend when the device is connected again
– it interacts with the native device capabilities of the mobile phone, such as GPS and the built in photo camera.
Here we see Ted taking a picture of the audience – for lack of a real car – and including that picture into the ADF Mobile application to be uploaded once reconnected to the backend and eventually into the database.
At this point the flow that started with the car owner and then had the damage inspector doing his work on site, now flips to the back office claims controller.
First Ted showed a number of operational dashboards that are created using built in declarative components – that either render as Flash with animation to devices that support that or as SVG or PNG to devices without Flash support. In the near future, the components will render to HTML 5, as well JavaFX.
Some more charts, just to show off a little:
Another example of the Thematic Map where polygon based pictures and data based layers are integrated to provide a graphical data visualization that supports various rich interaction patterns:
For example, the end user can use drag and drop to drag any of the highlighted states to the table on the right side, for example to compose a collection of objects that need to be looked at:
Another interesting and highly interactive component: the pivot table
Finally a real dashboard with a number gauges that signify aggregates and potential deviations that may require action.
In this case, a number of claims do not have the fault specified, an indication of who caused the damage to the car.
At this point, Ted click on the ‘open excel’ button to load all records for the claims without fault indication to an Excel-sheet. Note that this sheet is not just a stand alone comma separated values file. It is an ADF application in its own right!
In addition to the ADF Mobile Client, there is a separate channel that allows a disconnected mode, the ADF Desktop Integration. This Excel sheet is based on the same data controls used in the rich web application. It has the same controls to manipulate data. And it can run in connected mode and also in disconnected mode. In the latter case, the user can work on the sheet anywhere she likes – without requiring an internet connection – let alone a VPN connection into the office network environment.
When the work is done, it can be saved locally (to the file system). When next the connection is available, the user is prompted to upload the changes to the backend and synchronization takes place.
The dashboard with the gauges should immediately reflect the fact that there is now one less fault-less claim, as they have been wired up with the ADF Active Data Service Server Push functionality (also a largely declarative feature).
Pretty cool! Thanks guys at the ADF team.
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