Another Oracle OpenWorld is behind us, and it was certainly a busy one for us. In case you didn't have a chance to attend, or follow the twitter frenzy during the week, here are the key take aways that you should be aware of if you are developing with either Oracle ADF or Oracle MAF.
Oracle Alta UI
We released our design patterns for building modern applications for multiple channels. This include a new skin and many samples that show you how to create the type of UIs that we are now using for our modern cloud based interfaces.
All the resources are at http://bit.ly/oraclealta
The nice thing is that you can start using it today in both Oracle ADF Faces and Oracle MAF - just switch the skin to get the basic color scheme. Instructions here.
Note however that Alta is much more than just a color change, if you really want an Alta type UI you need to start designing your UI differently - take a look at some of the screen samples or our demo application for ideas.
Cloud Based Development
A few weeks before OOW we released our Developer Cloud Service in production, and our booth and sessions showing this were quite popular. For those who are not familiar, the Developer Cloud Service, gives you a hosted environment for managing your code life cycle (git version management, Hudson continuos integration, and easy cloud deployment), and it also gives you a way to track your requirements, and manage team work.
While this would be relevant to any Java developing team, for ADF developers there are specific templates in place to make things even easier.
You can get to experience this in a trial mode by getting a trial Java service account here.
Another developer oriented cloud service that got a lot of focus this year was on the upcoming Oracle Mobile Cloud Service - which includes everything your team will need in order to build mobile backends (APIs, Connectors, Notification, Storage and more). We ran multiple hands-on labs and sessions covering this, and it was featured in many keynotes too.
In the Application development tools general session we also announced that in the future we'll provide a capability called Oracle Mobile Application Accelerator (which we call Oracle MAX for short) which will allow power users to build on device mobile applications easily through a web interface. The applications will leverage MAF as the framework, and as a MAF developer you'll be able to provide additional templates, components and functionality for those.
Another capability we showed in the same session was a cloud based development environment that we are planning to add to both the Developer Cloud Service and the Mobile Cloud Service - for developers to be able to code in the cloud with the usual functions that you would expect from a modern code editor.
The Developer Community is Alive and Kicking
The ADF and MAF sessions were quite full this year, and additional community activities were successful as well. Starting with a set of ADF/MAF session by users on the Sunday courtesy of ODTUG and the ADF EMG. In one of the sessions there members of the community announced a new ADF data control for XML. Check out the work they did!
ODTUG also hosted a nice meet up for ADF/MAF developers, and announced their upcoming mobile conference in December. They also have their upcoming KScope15 summer conference that is looking for your abstract right now!
Coding Competition
Want to earn some money on the side? Check out the Oracle MAF Developer Challenge - build a mobile app and you can earn prizes that range from $6,000 to $1,000.
Sessions
With so many events taking place it sometime hard to hit all the sessions that you are interested in. And while the best experience is to be in the room, you might get some mileage from just looking at the slides. You can find the slides for many sessions in the session catalog here. And a list of the ADF/MAF sessions here.
See you next year.