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ADF-JHeadstart workshop last week

18 May 2005 at 08:40 CEST | In JDeveloper, JHeadstart, Oracle, Workshops & trainings |

As mentioned earlier, I attended the ADF-JHeadstart workshop last week at Oracle in the Netherlands. Sandra Muller, one of the developers of JHeadstart at Oracle Consulting was giving the workshop and I must say she did a great job.

I attended the Oracle University class training on ADF a couple of weeks ago and was a bit disappointed. I think that was my own fault. Before attending the course, I already worked through the Oracle JDeveloper 10g Handbook from Oracle Press. The book got me started with most concepts related to ADF programming (J2EE basics, MVC, BC4J, etc). I then played around with JDeveloper for a couple of weeks before attending the ADF course. I guess the course targets students without any J2EE/ADF knowledge. This did mean a lot of it was already known to me and the course was not as effective as I hoped it to be.

But the ADF-JHeadstart workshop came to the rescue! First of all, it is targeted as an advanced course to people with the basic knowledge about ADF/J2EE programming. The other great thing is that it revolves around UIX programming, something (almost) not covered in the JDeveloper 10g handbook and the ADF course.

The ADF-JHeadstart workshop started of with setting up your environment (JDeveloper v10.1.2 and JHeadstart v10.1.2) and getting to know the business case. We then continued creating a UIX prototype mockup wizard without any data bindings. This was a great way to quickly build a (non-functioning) prototype to show to a customer. Day one ended with finishing the prepared database design and creating the database schema.

The morning of day 2 was spent creating the Business Components and some business rules. The afternoon of day 2 was used to use actual data in the wizard created at day 1. A good part of day 3 was used to build several UIX pages for the application. The last part of day 3 was used to start of with JHeadstart generation of some other (UIX) pages.

Day 4 was used to complete the JHeadstart generation and to cover some advanced JHeadstart topics, including customization of the JHeadstart templates. The last day was used for J2EE security and the use of DataSources.

The workshop was very useful and much more realistic then the exercises used in any course. The exercises in traditional courses seem to be created to fit the tool being used for 100%. It’s when you’re back at your own desk with a real-world application when you find it is not all that easy as it was in the course. The workshop is much more realistic and also opens your eyes to things that do not work as easy as they appear in JDeveloper. You find a lot of small things that might have cost you a day or two to figure out on your own.

If you have the basic knowledge about ADF/J2EE programming and want to learn more about UIX and/or JHeadstart, this workshop is definitely for you! The good news is Oracle will be running the same workshop again in September in the Netherlands or at any other location/date on request.