RADalcove

Oracle Open World is just over 2 weeks away and that means it’s time to start getting serious about creating that schedule! There are many sessions worth attending and unfortunately you can’t see them all, but here are a few must-sees for ADF developers of any skill level:

The ADF Methodology Group (a google group consisting of ADFers from around the world) will be meeting to discuss the vision for ADF and share their experiences in developing with ADF – all are welcome! – “Oracle ADF Enterprise Methodology Group: ODTUG Oracle Fusion Middleware SIG”
Sunday 10:30-11:30
Moscone West L3 Room 3014

My co-author, Frank Nimphius is presenting his all-encompassing “Advanced Oracle ADF Faces Development”
Sunday 15:45-16:45
Hilton Hotel, Yosemite B

Duncan Mills is presenting “Oracle Fusion Design Fundamentals”
Monday 10:15 – 11:15
Hilton Hotel, Yosemite B

Ted Farrell is giving the Oracle Develop Keynote – “Breaking the Collaboration Barrier with Rich Enterprise Applications”
Hilton Hotel, Grand Ballroom B
Monday 13:15 – 14:15

Steve Muench will be showing how Fusion Applications division at Oracle is using ADF and explaining lessons learned – “Oracle Application Development Framework: Oracle Fusion Applications Teams’ Best Practices”
Tuesday 14:30 – 15:30
Hilton Hotel, Golden Gate 3

Much more useful info will be exchanged at the ADF Unconference, where developers, including those from the ADF Methodology Group, will share their ADF knowledge
Wednesday 13:00 – 15:00
Moscone Overlook

I’ll be presenting the following sessions:
S309421 “Oracle Fusion Development Experience: An Oracle Application Development Framework Overview”
three slots: Sunday 11:45 – 12:45, Monday 14:30 – 15:30, and Tuesday 16:00 – 17:00
Hilton Hotel, Continental Ballroom 6

S307648 “Ensuring Reusability in Oracle ADF: Designing for Data Model and Component Reuse”
Tuesday 17:30 – 18:30
Hilton Hotel, Golden Gate 3

S309014 “Developing with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g: A Customer Case Study”
Wednesday 17:00 – 18:00
Moscone South, Room 304

S309421 is a demo-heavy session for ADF newbies, showing how to develop basic ADF applications and how it fits into the Fusion MW stack.
S307648 is an intermediate-level session, covering ADF libraries, templates, and reusable components.
And I have bad session karma apparently, because for about the 4th year in a row, I’ll be presenting the last session before the Wednesday night festivities(!), but if you can stick around, S309014 will highlight how one of our reference customers was successful in their ground-up development of an 11g ADF/SOA app – their CIO and lead developers will be on-hand to demo their application and answer your questions about lessons learned, team development processes, etc.

All of these sessions and more are highlighted in the Fusion Development Schedule: http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/events/fusiondevelopmentoow09.pdf

And just a note for those new to OOW – In Middleware, at least, the demo grounds in the exhibition hall are staffed by Product Managers, and we all hang out there when not presenting, so that is a great way to find us and ask questions that need more explanation than the typical 5 minute Q&A session allows for.

See you soon!
Lynn

A new press release has just come out that highlights Collect America’s experience with JDeveloper and ADF. If you are a evaluating ADF for your next application development project, this is a must-read! Collect America is using the entire ADF stack – ADF Business Components, ADF Controller, and ADF Faces. They’ve even developed their own CSS skin. The application was built with JDeveloper 11g and is running on WLS 10.3 production.

Read the press release here:
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Oracle-Corporation-NASDAQ-ORCL-1034526.html

This article is a follow-up to 2 previous postings:
Understanding available WebLogic Server downloads for ADF Applications
and
Extending WebLogic Server for ADF Applications
and assumes you have followed the steps in both.
This means that you have JDeveloper installed on your local machine, that you have a WebLogic Server installed on a remote machine, and you’ve extended the WLS server with the required JRF template for ADF applications, and that you’ve started the WLS server with -Djps.app.credential.overwrite.allowed=true so that database credentials will be uploaded to the server when an application is deployed. If you haven’t done these steps, go back through the previous two posts and follow those instructions.

If you’re still with me, now you’re ready to deploy a simple ADF application to the server to validate that it’s ready for real ADF applications.

The easiest way to develop a simple ADF application (if you don’t already have one on hand) is to follow the cue cards.

1. From your development machine, open JDeveloper and choose Help > Cue Cards and select the Build a Fusion Web Application cue card:



2. The first step of the cue card is to install the schema. The example uses a hostname of localhost, meaning that the sample schema is installed on a local database. If you’re going to be deploying to a remote machine with WLS installed, then the schema will need to be installed somewhere where the remote machine can connect to, such as your team’s shared database. Keep that in mind through the first step and then follow through all the steps in Part 1 and Part 2 of the cue card to create the example. You’ll end up with an application with ADF business components, an ADF task flow, and two ADF Faces views:

   

   If you want to cheat a bit, you can download the application completed through parts 1 and 2 of the cue card here.

3. The last step of Part 2 of the cue card is to run the application locally. This is a step that you should always perform on any application before you deploy it, to ensure that it runs properly and does what you expect. This is the primary reason that WLS is embedded in JDeveloper; you can test incremental changes in an application without having to redeploy the application. Make sure that you perform this step. For the example application, you should see the following when running locally:

   

4. Once the application runs successfully locally, create a connection in JDeveloper to your shared WLS server. Open the Resource Palette, right click Application Server, and choose New Application Server connection:

   

5. Specify a name for the connection, such as SharedDevServer, and leave the default WebLogic 10.3 specified as the connection type:

   
   Click Next

6. Specify the username and password you created when installing WebLogic Server, such as weblogic and welcome1:

   

   The security people will be after me if I don’t mention here that you should not actually use the default password, but this is the password that the JDeveloper-embedded version of WebLogic Server uses, so there you go. Click Next.

7. Enter the hostname where you have installed WebLogic Server, and the port you installed to (7001 by default). Additionally, enter the domain that you extended with JRF. If you did not create a new domain, this might be “AdminServer”, but that’s actually not recommended because the AdminServer domain has enough tasks to do without hosting your applications. If that’s the case for you, you might want to go back to step 11 of the appendix in Steve Muench’s article and create a new domain and then extend that domain with the JRF files. In my previous post, I extended the my_domain domain and so that’s the domain I specify here:

   

8. Finally, test the connection. A crucial step. Ensure that all tests complete successfully:

   

9. At this point, there’s a few things to do to make life easier for this test deployment. The first thing to ensure is that when deployed to a remote machine, that machine has access to the data source connection that the application uses. You could do this by creating a global data source in WLS and then configuring your domain to use that connection. However, we’re just testing here, so in the case that your application was built using a data source based on your local machine’s database (and presuming that the machine that you’re deploying to doesn’t also have a database running at localhost), change the database connection that the application uses to a remotely-accessible database where you have installed the FOD schema (see step two above). To do this, expand Application Resources beneath your Projects listing in the Application Navigator. Expand Connections, Database, and then right click FOD and choose Properties:

   

10. Change the connection details to point to your remotely-accessible database:

    

11. The next thing that makes life easier for this test deployment is to limit the amount of typing that you have to do to access the application remotely. Some history: JDeveloper uses the name of your application, the name of your project, and then “context-root” for the root url of your web application (BrowseEditApp-ViewController-context-root, for example). It does this because it can then ensure that the url to any application that you run in the embedded server in JDeveloper is unique. However, when you run a web application in JDeveloper, the browser is automatically launched for you and you don’t have to type a url. This is fine for testing locally, but you can make things easier for deployment by changing the default url to something more manageable. To do this, double click on your web application project (ViewController) to bring up the project properties. Click the Deployment node and select the Deployment Profile:

    

    You might have noticed that you didn’t have to explicitly create deployment profiles for your application (.EAR), data model (.JAR) or web applications (.WAR) – JDeveloper creates them for you and you only need to modify them if you have specific deployment configurations to consider. Click Edit to edit the automatically generated WAR deployment profile.

12. On the General page of the WAR deployment profile dialog, select Specify Java EE web context root and enter a more user-friendly name, such as BrowseEditApp:

    

13. You’re now ready to deploy. You will be deploying the default EAR file profile, which is stored at the application level, and includes the WAR profile that you just modified as well as the JAR file that was automatically defined for the ADF Business Components Model project. Click the dropdown next to your application name, and choose Deploy. A series of context menus will appear as you select the name of your application’s EAR deployment profile (BrowseEditApp_application1 by default), to, and then the name of your shared server that you defined in step 5 above:

    
    The deployment log will appear in JDeveloper, and you should see a successful deployment like the following:

    

    If you see errors instead, check that you’ve followed the post for extending your domain.

14. Now you can access your application from a browser. The url will be the hostname of your server, the port (default 7001), followed by the context root of your web application, followed by the servlet url “faces” because this is a JSF application, followed by the name of your starting .jspx page. In this example application, you don’t have a starting .jspx page because your starting point is actually an ADF task flow and a slew of parameters are required to load the task flow properly (in most applications, you’d have a starting index.jspx that redirects to your initial task flow’s url for convenience). So in this test, copy the Target URL from the log that was created when you test-ran the application locally in step 3 above. The tab for this log is called Running: DefaultServer. Click that tab and then select the entire contents of the Target URL:

    

    Right click and choose Copy, then paste that into a browser. Replace the local ip address with the hostname for your shared server, replace the 7101 embedded WLS Server port with the default standalone port of 7001, and finally replace the longer default context root with the one that you defined for this application. Leave all the remaining parameters as-is. The resulting url will be something like the following:
    http://sharedserver.mycompany.com:7001/BrowseEditApp/faces/adf.task-flow?adf.tfId=orders-flow&adf.tfDoc=/WEB-INF/orders-flow.xml

15. Click enter to launch the application (you’ll see a spinning “O” first to let you know the application is loading). The result is your test application, deployed to a remote, standalone, JRF-extended WebLogic Server:

    

Voila!

I don’t envy our OTN content managers; organizing an ever-growing number of Oracle products into appropriate categories must be quite the challenge. Add to that the fact that each product has several flavors (studio, with language support, etc.) and the lists of links can get pretty confusing. So here’s a dummy’s guide.

Starting from the Fusion Middleware home page on OTN:

The first section is “For Development” – this includes the Net installer which I’m sure is very useful but I haven’t used it so I won’t cover that here. This section also includes the download links for the R1 version of JDeveloper. If you are an ADF-er, you need the recommended studio addition. By default, this JDeveloper R1 installation gives you both JDeveloper and WebLogic Server. You can use that download to configure a WebLogic Server installation as documented in the Appendix of Steve Muench’s Policy Migration document. So if you just need to deploy an ADF application to your local machine, or you already have the JDeveloper install downloaded to your group’s shared machine, you can stop here and follow Steve’s article to install and configure WebLogic Server. However, if you are looking to create a shared deployment server for ADF applications for your team, (and you don’t want to download JDeveloper to that separate server), keep reading…

The second section on the Fusion Middleware home page is “For Deployment”.
Click the See All link there to see all the various links for Fusion Middleware. You’re after the R1 release of WebLogic Server, so click All Available Platforms for the WebLogic Server entry under Runtime Software. Here’s a description of what each flavor contains:

Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.1) + OEPE – Package Installer: Installer that includes Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse (OEPE). If you are reading this, you’re probably using JDeveloper for development, not Eclipse, so skip this one.

Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.1) + OEPE – Package Installer (International Languages): Same as above except that the installer includes support for multi-byte languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.1) + OEPE – Net Installer: The fancy Net Installer for the above two flavors that I haven’t used and so won’t document here.

Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.1) – Net Installer: Again, the Net Installer that I haven’t used and so won’t document here.

Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.1) – Package Installer: This is the WLS flavor you want if you are looking for a generic server for deployment.

Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.1) – Package Installer (International Languages): Download this WLS flavor if you are looking for a generic server for deployment, and you need the installer to support for multi-byte character sets.

The rest of the page lists versions of WLS prior to the R1 release.

There, that explains all the links anyway. Now for the installation and configuration.

For the installation of “Oracle WebLogic Server 11gR1 (10.3.1) – Package Installer”, see the WebLogic Server installation guide.

Then, to support deployment of ADF applications, follow this post to extend the server to include the Java Required Files (JRF), which include the ADF libraries. This is what you need if you’ve tried to deploy ADF applications to your standalone WebLogic Server and are seeing errors like the following:
weblogic.management.DeploymentException: [J2EE:160149]Error while processing library references. Unresolved application library references, defined in weblogic-application.xml: [Extension-Name: adf.oracle.domain, Implementation-Version: 11.1.1.1.0, exact-match: false], [Extension-Name: oracle.jsp.next, exact-match: false].

Finally, to ensure that the credentials that you supply in the database connections for your ADF Application are deployed and include the password, add -Djps.app.credential.overwrite.allowed=true to the JAVA_PROPERTIES entry in the FMW_HOME/user_projects/domains/yourdomain/bin/setDomainEnv.sh file (or setDomainEnv.cmd if you are on Windows). This is what you need if you have deployed an ADF application to your server but are seeing the following errors when the application is accessed:

oracle.jbo.DMLException: JBO-26061: Error while opening JDBC connection.
at oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPool.createConnection(ConnectionPool.java:253)
at oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPool.instantiateResource(ConnectionPool.java:168)
at oracle.jbo.pool.ResourcePool.createResource(ResourcePool.java:546)
at oracle.jbo.pool.ResourcePool.useResource(ResourcePool.java:327)
at oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPool.getConnectionInternal(ConnectionPool.java:104)
Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01005: null password given; logon denied


This post serves as a step by step guide to extending a generic WebLogic Server domain on Linux using the Application Development Runtime package available on OTN. The Application Development Runtime package includes the Java Required Files (JRF) which include the ADF runtime libraries necessary to deploy ADF applications on WLS. In case you’re wondering, these libraries are already included for the default domain that’s installed with JDeveloper, so that’s why no domain extension is necessary when you’re running an application directly from JDeveloper. However, if you’ve deployed an ADF application to your domain and are getting errors like “Unresolved application library references, defined in weblogic-application.xml: [Extension-Name: adf.oracle.domain, Implementation-Version: 11.1.1.1.0, exact-match: false], [Extension-Name: oracle.jsp.next, exact-match: false]“, then your domain doesn’t include the JRF extension and you’ll need to follow these steps.

1. From the Fusion Middleware Download page:

2. Scroll down to Application Development Runtime and click Disk1 to download.

3. Save the zip file to disk.

4. Open the zip once it has downloaded successfully and extract the files.

5. cd to the location of the files and run the installer:

6. If the installer prompts for a JDK, enter the one in the your Fusion Middleware home directory:

7. When the installer launches, select a directory for the inventory of the install:

8. If the installer was not run as root, the installer will prompt for the createCentralInventory.sh to be run before the install proceeds:

9. Run the script as directed:

The script should execute successfully.

10. Click OK in the installer dialog to continue the installation:

11. Click Next on the welcome page of the installer.

12. Click Next once the requirements are verified:

13. Specify the Oracle Fusion Middleware Home directory (where you have installed WLS 10.3) and click Next:

14. Click Install to start the installation:

15. Click Finish when the install is complete.

16. From the quick start dialog, launch the configuration wizard:

17. In the configuration wizard, select Extend an existing WebLogic domain and click Next:

18. Select the domain that you previously created and click Next:

19. Select Oracle JRF – 11.1.1.0 [Oracle_APPDEV1] as the extension source and click Next:

20. Click Next to skip the Optional configurations steps:

21. Click Extend to extend the domain:

22. Click Done to exit the configuration wizard once the extension is applied successfully.

23. Finally, to ensure that the credentials that you supply in the database connections for your ADF Application are deployed and include the password, add -Djps.app.credential.overwrite.allowed=true to the JAVA_PROPERTIES entry in the FMW_HOME/user_projects/domains/yourdomain/bin/setDomainEnv.sh file (or setDomainEnv.cmd if you are on Windows), and restart the server using FMW_HOME/user_projects/domains/yourdomain/bin/startWebLogic.sh. This is what you need to do if you have deployed an ADF application to your server but are seeing the following errors when the application is accessed:

oracle.jbo.DMLException: JBO-26061: Error while opening JDBC connection.
at oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPool.createConnection(ConnectionPool.java:253)
at oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPool.instantiateResource(ConnectionPool.java:168)
at oracle.jbo.pool.ResourcePool.createResource(ResourcePool.java:546)
at oracle.jbo.pool.ResourcePool.useResource(ResourcePool.java:327)
at oracle.jbo.server.ConnectionPool.getConnectionInternal(ConnectionPool.java:104)
Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace
java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01005: null password given; logon denied


Congratulations! Your WLS domain is now ready to host ADF applications.

I know, I know, it’s been ages since my last post. What have I been doing all that time you may ask? Well, I’ve been working on the new release of Fusion Order Demo, helping out Collect America with their application, and co-authoring a book with Frank Nimphius – all these things were based on builds that weren’t externally available, and so it didn’t seem fair to post something that wasn’t possible for the public to actually use. Now that the R1 launch is complete, I have something to share!

I watched the R1 launch event (catch the replay here) with what I gather is the same amount of pride that parents have when sending their children off to college – we raised this product from infancy and it’s now ready to face the world. Hoorah! Jennifer Briscoe from Collect America was on-hand at the launch event to share their success story – they’re now production with their shiny new application developed with JDeveloper and ADF 11g. It’s been great working with them – they are a talented team and its nice to know that one of our best references for ADF resides in Denver.

Fusion Order Demo got a major revamping for the R1 release. I polished up the use of ADF features across the demo (ADF Business Components, ADF Controller, and ADF Faces), and wired up the store front part of the application to call the SOA composites, written by Clemens Utschig. Its no longer “just” a useful demo for customers and our documentation writers, as its now used as a vehicle for sanity testing across the Fusion Middleware stack. And again, there’s pride sneaking in…but seriously, I spent many an evening working on that demo when I could’ve been out doing something fun. All in all its been a great experience working on FOD – you never TRULY learn a feature unless you have to use it practically. Or write about it. Which leads to the book…but I’ll leave that for another post, which will certainly be coming at you with less delay than the last one! Geesh!

I’ve written a little how-to for understanding how database connections work in JDeveloper 11 technology preview – we’ve beefed up the reusability and automation of database connections for 11, but that’s caused some confusion because its different from how things were done in 10.1.3.x. We’re still making improvements for JDeveloper 11, but for now, the following document should help with the technology preview release that’s out on OTN.

Understanding Database Connections in JDeveloper 11 Technology Preview

Today marks my 9th year at Oracle. But no worries, I don’t feel so old since I was hired at age 12 . In the past 9 years, I’ve attended and presented at countless Oracle, user group, and industry conferences. Its one of the best parts of being a product manager – I get to find out how customers are using our products, field questions, and hear an audible ‘aha’ when teaching a new concept – its very rewarding. Following a nice long holiday after JavaOne, I’m right back on the circuit – in a few weeks I’ll be presenting at the Oracle Develop conferences in Munich (June 18-19) and Prague (June 21-22). These include in-depth presentations as well as the always valuable hands-on sessions. Several sessions are especially valuable to Forms/Peoplesoft/4GL developers looking for guidance on Java EE development using the Fusion stack, including “Oracle Fusion and the ADF Development Experience: Today and Tomorrow” – this will give you the full details of the technology stack that’s being used to develop Fusion Applications, and explain how you can use this stack to develop in-house applications today. There’s 2 hands-on sessions that nicely follow this presentation and provide a deep dive into the technology:

• Developing for Fusion – The Business Services Layer (using ADF Business Components)
• Developing for Fusion – The User Interface Layer (using ADF Faces)

Check out the full agenda and register here (Munich is lovely this time of year).

Is this thing on?

For years now, I’ve avoided blogging because I thought that if I had time to post something clever, I should instead publish it through official Oracle channels. However, as more and more folks will be developing applications using the same stack that is being used to develop Fusion Applications (including ADF Business Components and Oracle’s JSF library, ADF Faces), I feel compelled to start this site as a way to disseminate information, even in a less-polished form. My colleagues’ blogs are invaluable resources, and I hope to continue the tradition!

So now for my first post. Drum roll, please.

I’m at JavaOne this week, talking with attendees about JDeveloper and ADF in the exhibitor’s pavillion. The ADF Faces Rich Client components were impressive onstage at yesterday’s general session, and generated a lot of interest at the demo booth. We’ve released a preview of the components, included in the technology preview release of JDeveloper 11g. These components promise to provide flair and function in enterprise web apps.

Also, over the last several months, I’ve been working with Ric Smith and others on a demo app for the Fusion stack. We’ve made some good progress and have released a limited version of the ’store front’ portion of the application:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/samples/fod/index.html

The limited version doesn’t fully show off the blood, sweat, and tears that are going into this demo app, but we have left in new ADF business components features like groovy validation and the rich ADF Faces components as well. Enjoy!