UX ADF Design Patterns - Connect The Dots

I know all your favorite spots,
And tonight we will connect the dots.
- From "Connect The Dots" by The Spill Canvas

So, guess where I was last week? Aw, c'mon, guess.  Really, just try once?  While, alright, if you don't want to guess...I was at Oracle HQ for a three-day workshop on UX ADF Design Patterns!  Lots of hands-on work in using design patterns to build wire frames and then implementing those designs in ADF.  The workshop was really all about connecting the dots.

Also had the opportunity to see plenty of new product prototypes...none of which I can talk about (inserted frustrated sigh here) other than to say that there is some extremely cool stuff in the pipeline from the Oracle UX team.  Seems like this team's innovation engine is really taking their game up another notch.

Back to the workshop.  While I can't get into the finer details of the workshop here, I can tell you that everything from the workshop is available on-line.  To wit*:

• UX.Direct provides both a design process and a toolkit that you can use today...right now...fully functional...free (and how often do we hear "Oracle" and "free" in the same breath?).  You'll want to start by spending some time exploring here.
• ADF Design Patterns are a subset of Fusion Applications Design Patterns. The idea here is to share out the Fusion Apps design patterns so that developers can independently build applications that look, feel and function like Fusion Applications (think partner and customer enablement).  Although the OBIEE Design Patterns were not explicitly covered in the workshop, the same concept of consistency and best practices applies.
• My next foray into design patterns will include building some mobile apps.   So it was pretty timely for a portion of the workshop to cover Mobile Design Patterns.  Definitely worth checking out.
•  During the workshop, many of the attendees (including me) discovered that our ADF skills were more than a bit lacking.  And it was difficult to implement our designs without those skills.  I found myself continually referring to Oracle's basic online JDeveloper and ADF training.  If you're not familiar with JDeveloper and ADF, this is a great learning resource...saved my bacon many times, including a few instances last week.

In summary, great workshop.  Covered stuff I can take back to the job and use.  Now, for those of you who think I'm just regurgitating Oracle marketing hooey, check out the new Splash BI product from EiS Technologies (yes, I work here - shameless plug).  We built the product with JDeveloper and ADF Essentials (another Oracle freebie - wow!), using the ADF Design Patterns.  The combination cut our development time by 75 percent and allowed us to build a simple, great-looking enterprise reporting app.  It was just a matter of connecting the dots...

*I have always wanted to use this phrase in a blog post!