From Concept to Delivery
Contents
1. MOG AG ALG ALG AG AG AG ALG ALG AO AO AG AM x i l AAAA l WAVAVAY VAAVAAI TAVI ES as a BM oe eS IWAVAVAVA ts l Throughout this magazine you will no doubt see articles from leading experts in a whole range of technologies using their years of experience to successfully implement solutions on the Oracle stack Well in this article I want to tell a slightly different story a story of how an applications DBA rather than someone from a development background managed to end up successfully designing and building a production on device mobile application for Lloyd s Register If you want to learn the lessons and maybe start building your own mobile applications then read on Richard Childe Independent Oracle Applications DBA amp ADF Developer Why Mobile I ve always thought that whilst the IT industry is quick to announce something as the next big thing the reality is that unless the people who hold the IT purse strings have also decided it s the next big thing then it s going to count for little There are plenty of statistics out there to demonstrate the explosion in mobile app usage such as the research showing that overall app usage grew 115 in 2013 And when you see the number of people at work with smartphones and hear the complaints that they can t access anything to do with their jobs on them then it s2. clear that the demand for mobile is tangible real and it is here today Everybody wants mobile apps People on the move want quick access to their work data on their shiny new tablet not on www ukoug org an anti virus laden corporate laptop that takes an age to start Working at Lloyd s Register LR I d already dipped my toes in the water with Oracle ADF by re developing a few of LR s public facing web pages using Oracle ADF 11g I d learnt the framework mostly by reading Grant Ronald s The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development and studied a few examples on the web Some people are little bit wary of a perceived complexity of ADF but once you find your way around it you start to appreciate just how quickly and easily you can get an application up and running A Mobile Framework So with only a little ADF knowledge my interest was piqued when ADF Mobile hit the market in late 2012 ADF Mobile is a hybrid mobile framework based on Java and HTMLS5 which can be written once but deployed to both iOS and Android devices decided to take ADF Mobile for a spin and see if could get a simple piece of data out of a database and onto a phone Somewhat surprisingly this proved to be very straight forward The enthusiastic response to this small achievement from Lloyd s Register management was encouraging This simple demonstration showed that developing a mobile app could be fairly straightforward did n
3. server infrastructure in place it was time to make the app available on Apple s iStore and Google s Play You ll see a lot of bad press on the web around how picky Apple can be with allowing apps to go on the iStore but actually we found the process to be fairly stress free The ADF Mobile framework meets all the stipulated technical requirements so unless you ve shoe horned something into your app that the Apple reviewers aren t happy with you should find the submission process goes smoothly Make sure your accompanying documentation is up to scratch and make sure the description of the app accurately reflects what it does A surveyor carrying out a vessel survey may find it useful to have the vessel s current GPS location available Using the device s camera to capture images of damaged or worn components and upload them toa database may also be a handy capability All of these are capabilities the framework already supports and don t think it s an exaggeration to say that a well written mobile app has the potential to make life much easier for people out in field and Technology Richard Childe And remember that materialised views are your friend The tools you will need An Apple Mac or Macbook worth it for the iPhone simulator alone All the Android emulators tried were as much use as a chocolate teapot Oracle JDeveloper amp Lots of coffee General Tips Speak to your users and ask them exactly they wa
4. e debugger was a must as it can talk to the simulator or a physical device and halt the execution at a breakpoint in the usual way made extensive use of JDeveloper s built in HTTP Analyser to test my web service calls which are basically RESTful web services which hook into an ADF application module to obtain the data from ADF Business Components view objects Each row being returned from the view object is loaded into a POJO an array of which is returned from the web service call in REST XML format A simplified view of the architecture looks a little like Figure 3 ADF Web ADF Mobile g gt Components Manager seca ieee FIGURE 3 SIMPLIFIED ARCHITECTURE VIEW N Branding and look and feel tend to be hot topics when it comes to mobile apps and luckily enough LR were undergoing a major re branding exercise during the development phase so fortunately the in house brand management team gave me plenty of ideas and direction on a look and feel With ADF Mobile it s pretty easy to change the look and feel as was using skinning which allows you to create a style sheet to be applied to all your mobile pages in the same way a website does rather than burdening each page with styling directives Determining how the users would navigate their way through the app was initially based on some very simple wire framing of pages together with a basic page flow diagram The app is essentially one ADF task flow a serie
5. e an ideal way to present the work I d done so far When the development work was complete it was time to add security That meant securing the web services with Oracle Web Services Manager OWSM and SSL enabling the web service traffic We placed a load balancer in front of our Weblogic servers and terminated SSL at that point which allows us to Spread the load across multiple servers and provides for a much simpler URL www ukoug org LCVAL CIEE ADF Mobile Learn how to build a small app There are plenty of good videos out there from the Oracle development team to get you started with Mobile ADF BC For database queries learn how to build a simple application module with a view object to query some data Java Basic syntax and structure Look for examples on how to code a RESTful web service and access your ADF BC components and learn how to use the debugger and the HTTP Analyser SQL Tuning Again if you are going to be running database queries your queries need to finish pronto You may get away with a SELECT statement taking 5 seconds to complete in an OLTP system but not in a mobile app Learn to read an explain plan Or ask your friendly DBA to do it for you Good luck with that naming scheme and SSL certificate setup to facilitate any future applications sited in the same infrastructure Deploying on the Apple iStore and Google Play Once I d put the supporting production database and application
6. nt out of the app Make sure they ll want to download it and use it on a regular basis Keep them engaged during the development process to make sure everything is heading in the right direction Make the app intuitive to use and easy to navigate It shouldn t require any sort of user manual All this might seem obvious but it s important not to lose sight of it Good luck change the way they work The possibilities are huge Take a look around your workplace and have a think about how mobility can improve existing processes Mobile App Use Increased 115 in 2013 http mashable com 2014 01 14 mobile app use 2013 Oracle Fusion Applications User Experience Patterns and Guidelines http www oracle com webfolder ux applications fusiongps mobile index htm Know Your Users Guideline http www oracle com webfolder ux applications fusiongps mobile index htm Study Average App Session Lasts About 1 Minute http readwrite com 2012 01 17 study average app session lasts about 1_ minute awesm ovcbifLYharOyn 33
7. ook less than a second to complete then it should be perfectly workable to simply request and deliver data to the mobile application as and when it was needed For these web service calls REST seemed to be the way to go due to its well documented advantages for mobile access Pee e eer erececeercereeseereereseeerereeereeEeeeeeseLeLeseeeeEeeeneeeseseoeseoeeE One immediate advantage of writing this mobile app is that we weren t committing to some horrendously complex application Mobile apps by their nature tend to be simple and easy to use When planning an app it s always worth remembering that the average time a person will spend FIGURE 2 VESSEL SURVEY CATEGORIES AND STATUS Weblogic Server 12 1 2 l JDBC Oracle Database Connection 11 g Pool using a mobile app is just over 1 minute so decided probably shouldn t be looking at trying to shovel a re write of E Business Suite on to people s phones When it came to actually coding the app switched to using a Mac as the iPhone simulator proved to be an essential item in the toolkit allowing me to quickly view the fruits of my labours without loading it on to an actual phone However now and again did need to see how it behaved on a physical device so deployed my web services into the integrated Weblogic server and put the laptop on a WiFi network so that a phone or tablet could talk to it My app uses a number of backing beans and using th
8. ot have to involve a vast army of developers could sit happily on an existing Oracle infrastructure and would not entail the spiralling development costs that sometimes happens when a small mobile development company comes unstuck when trying to deal with your IT infrastructure Technology Richard Childe The Maersk Co Ltd United Kingdom wire MAERSK IZMIR wens MAERSK KAMPALA MAERSK KYRENIA ween MAERSK BRANI ween MAERSK BATUR MIARA f FIGURE 1 INITIAL PAGE DISPLAYING OVERALL SNAPSHOT OF SURVEY DATA FOR A CLIENT PLUS VESSEL LIST AND SURVEY STATUS INDICATOR The Mobile Application We already had a definite idea of what we wanted for one particular production app something that would allow clients of the company in the shipping industry to monitor the status of the inspection surveys which are regularly carried out on their vessels This on device application would be based on a sub set of data already exposed through Lloyd s Register website However if the same functionality was to be presented on the phone we had an immediate challenge couldn t see how could realistically employ any sort of on device caching strategy as the data volumes to be searched were very large specific to a particular user and constantly changing took the decision that so long as the mobile app wasn t pulling gigabytes of data over the network and the back end was running database queries that t
9. s of pages linked together with control flows Mostly the design process evolved slowly over time and in retrospect learned the importance of nailing down the whole UX from the start and not trying to deviate from it too much The initial beta testing we did with users made me re think the design a little and taught me that maybe didn t get enough user input from the outset Cee eereeseecceseereeesereeeeeeeeeeeeeEeeZeseLEeDneLeEeLEeLeseLesEZereeEEZeoeseoEe S Lesson learned Know your audience Take a look through Oracle s Fusion Applications User Experience Patterns and Guidelines website for some very good guidance on getting this right from the off www ukoug org If you re thinking of developing an app with Oracle ADF Mobile here s what you and your team if youre lucky enough to have one need to arm yourself with When it came to some initial beta testing we used TestFlight https testflightapp com to allow us to distribute the app to a selected user base under controlled conditions This was made easier by the Agile approach wed taken with this project which seems particularly suited to mobile app development We were able to make regular presentations of the app to the business stakeholders You don t need the full functioning finished application to demonstrate something meaningful to them And the iPhone simulator along with some devices handed around during the meetings mad
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