As we took roll call this morning at the first day of the internal JHeadstart training I'm at this week in Utrecht, I jotted down the countries represented. In a packed classroom with no seats left empty, we've got Oracle consultants and support engineers in the class from Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. What a great turnout!
It's a refreshing change to be sitting in the student's seat for me while Sandra, Peter, and Steven from the JHeadstart team guide us through the four day workshop from the point of view of consultants on a typical customer engagement using these tools. We'll be building a self-service front-end and internal backoffice application for a fictitious service business. Today we dove into ADF UIX and mocked up the basic web UI for the user-facing application. In 15-20 minutes we mocked-up a step-by-step wizard-style UI with multiple pages, with common elements nicely "factored" into reusable UIX templates. Our pages included text controls with Oracle Forms-style interactive LOV's and friendly date-pickers, as well as consistent page "chrome". None of the special UI features required any HTML/JavaScript guru knowledge. With UIX, you just say what you want on the screen.
In practice, our consultants often want to mock up the UI before building any of the back-end business services to use as part of the requirements validation discussions with the customer. Producing the screen mockups first can help make sure you are building the right kind of UI's the the end-users will be comfortable with. We ended the day building the basic ADF Business Components that will support the business service layer, and we'll be binding the UI mockups to the data exposed in a subsequent step.
This was a UI-mockup-first approach was perfect exercise for me since back in development we're working in 10.1.3 on trying to make our "UI first" development easier. I'm definitely taking notes on what people are finding less-than-straightforward so we can do further polishing around these common use cases in 10.1.3...
2:10:28 AM 
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