Oracle ADF Faces Cookbook: Transform the quality of your user interfaces and applications with this fascinating cookbook for Oracle ADF Faces. Over 80 recipes give you an insight into virtually every angle of the framework's potential.

Create your directory structure properly. What I usually do is start from the root directory of my user, for example, C:\Users\Amr in Windows or /Users/amr in a Nix-based OS, and start adding the structure of my development environment. So, in Windows, for instance, my workspace under the user directory looks like the following screenshot:

Create a dev directory where all the development will reside.

Create an apps directory, which will contain all the software starting from JDK to the middleware inside the Oracle directory.

Create a myworkspaces directory inside the dev directory, which will include different workspaces for each technology—you are free here to make it as per technology or per actual project—and then in each technology you have your different applications.

Create different environment variables for your development environment's dev directory, apps directory, and myworkspaces directory. This extra step will make it easy when you are installing different software to reach these directories easily using the command line. You should end up with the following environment variables:

$DEV_HOME=/Users/amr/dev
$APPS_HOME=$DEV_HOME/apps
$WORK_HOME=$DEV_HOME/myworkspaces

You can do the same in Windows by simply navigating to System Properties | Advanced | Environment variables and create three variables with these names:

DEV_HOME=C:\Users\Amr\dev
APPS_HOME=%DEV_HOME%\apps
WORK_HOME=%DEV_HOME%\myworkspaces

set DEV_HOME=C:\Users\Amr\dev
set APPS_HOME=%DEV_HOME%\apps
set WORK_HOME=%DEV_HOME%\myworkspaces

If you have Mac or other Nix-based systems, you can achieve the previous result by changing the .bash_profile file using a text editor or any text editing tools.

You can create one if none exists by opening a terminal and entering the following command:

vi ~/.bash_profile

Edit the file by pressing I to enter the edit mode, and add the following entries to the end of the file:

export DEV_HOME=/Users/Amr/dev
export APPS_HOME=$DEV_HOME/apps
export WORK_HOME=$DEV_HOME/myworkspaces

Save by pressing Esc and then :wq

Download the latest JDK from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk7-downloads-1880260.html.

You should download the latest JDK and it should work just fine, but you have to select the JDK suitable for your Operating System and its architecture

Depending on the operating system, the installation should be straightforward, as for each operating system, there should be an installer with it, for example, for Windows an exe installer, for Mac you will have a dmg, and an rpm for Linux

Change the JDK installation directory to be inside APPS_HOME.

I chose the location to be C:\Users\amr\dev\apps\jdk\jdk7_25 (jdk 7 update 25) in Windows or /Users/amr/dev/apps/jdk/jdk7_25 in Nix-based systems

Create a JAVA_HOME environment variable, and update the PATH environment variable to look at the bin folder inside our jdk7_25 directory. This will help you greatly if you use the Java command line often.

If you are using Windows, you should add the following environment variable:

JAVA_HOME=%APPS_HOME%\jdk\jdk7_25

You should change the PATH environment variable to the following:

PATH=%JAVA_HOME%\bin;

Make sure you put %JAVA_HOME%\bin inside PATH and not %JAVA_HOME% as we want the path to reference all the Java executable files such as java and javac

If you are using Mac or any other Nix-based system, you should edit the .bash_profile file to be the following:

export JAVA_HOME=$APPS_HOME/jdk/jdk7_25
export PATH=$JAVA_HOME/bin:$PATH

Notice that in Nix-based systems editing a .bash_profile is little bit different as the separator is a colon and not a semicolon

Go to http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/downloads/index.html and download the latest JDeveloper (currently 12.1.2.0.0). Make sure you accept the agreement and pick the generic version from the drop-down menu.

After your download is complete, open your command prompt or terminal and change the directory—using the cd command—to the directory that contains the .jar file you just downloaded, and then execute the following command line:

java –jar jdev_suite_121200.jar

Note that you can execute the java command directly because you added the %JAVA_HOME% or $JAVA_HOME\bin directory inside the PATH environment variable, and this command basically says, start a Java application from the JAR file provided.

After executing this command, you should be able to see the JDeveloper installer screen as shown in the following screenshot:

When you are prompted to enter your Oracle Home location you should choose C:\Users\<your_name>\dev\apps\oracle\Middleware\Oracle_Home.

If you have other middleware versions, you should install 12c on a different middleware directory, for example, C:\Users\<your_name>\dev\apps\oracle\Middleware12c\Oracle_Home

If you followed everything right and launched the JAR file with Java 7, the next step (prerequisites check) should pass without a problem. Click on Next and have a look at the summary of what will be installed by JDeveloper. Click on Install and let it install your favorite IDE that you will use during this book.

After a couple of minutes you should feel good as your JDeveloper is ready to go. Click on Finish Installation without opening JDeveloper and click on Finish to close your installer.

Open your Oracle Home directory that we set up when installing JDeveloper, and navigate to %MIDDLEWARE_HOME% | Oracle_Home | jdeveloper. There are two files that you want to change: the first file is ide.conf located under ide\bin\ide.conf.

Open the file using your favorite text editor and locate the following lines:

AddVMOption –Xms
AddVMOption -Xmx

You may want to increase these values if they are very low, for example, if you have more than 4 GB of RAM, you should set it to 1 GB each as shown in the following code:

AddVMOption –Xms1024M
AddVMOption –Xmx1024M

Save and close the file.

Open the jdev\bin\jdev.conf path under the jdeveloper directory.

Add the following entries at the end of the file:

# optimize the JVM for strings / text editing
AddVMOption -XX:+UseStringCache
AddVMOption -XX:+OptimizeStringConcat
AddVMOption -XX:+UseCompressedStrings

# if on a 64-bit system, but using less than 32 GB RAM, this reduces object pointer memory size
AddVMOption -XX:+UseCompressedOops

# use an aggressive garbage collector (constant small collections)
AddVMOption -XX:+AggressiveOpts

# for multi-core machines, use multiple threads to create objects and reduce pause times
AddVMOption -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC
AddVMOption -XX:+UseGCOverheadLimit

These settings ensure that your JVM is optimized for your operating system. Also note that some of them are tailored depending on your Operating System architecture. So, don't just copy and paste them. Check what can apply and add accordingly.

Start JDeveloper now. You have tuned it for your operating system, and now it's time to change some general preferences of JDeveloper itself. So, let's start by starting your JDeveloper as shown in the following screenshot:

When you get a prompt that asks which mode you want to choose, leave the default value of the Studio Developer (All Features) option and click on OK.

Go to the JDeveloper preferences by navigating to Tools toolbar | Preferences.

Change the following inside preferences:

Enable external tools by navigating to Tools | External Tools and making sure every item is selected and then clicking on OK.

Clone the Git project by navigating to Team | Git and clicking on the Clone menu.

The command is named Clone because of the distribution nature of Git, as you really clone the project locally on your machine

Leave the name as original, add https://github.com/agawish/ADF-Faces-Cookbook.git to the repository URL, enter your Github username and password, and click on Next.

If you entered your information correctly, you should see the branch master in the Include list. This is another great feature. When you have a stable project, the main code base should be in the master branch, but if you decided to implement other features, you may want to create a new branch and migrate it to the master branch when you finish.

Click on Next to choose the cloned repository directory, a name of your repository, and to check which branch you want.

Click on Finish after you finish and you will have the entire book's Git repository locally.

Click on No when you are prompted to create a project out of the Git repository. However, you don't want to choose that option since the repository contains multiple applications.

Access specific applications from the filesystem.