I am proud to announce a new ADF Faces based web application aimed to public use.

Since ADF Faces 10.1.3 are missing nice JSF menu component I did research if there is one suitable and cooperating with ADF Faces.

I decided to share with my trouble I faced lately with Mapviewer that turned up as a Java VM problem.

Good news for all developers trying to integrate Oracle Maps with ADF Faces.

You can find new version Of Oracle Maps as a part of MapViewer 11g (again it's only Preview release 1) on OTN. It has many improvements and one of them is possibility to access MapViewer server on cross-domain. It's very important feature because so far we had to use proxy server running on client machine to run Oracle Maps directly from JDeveloper or deploy application to OC4J with MapViewer to see maps. Since now it is very simple to test our maps because we can run Oracle Maps directly from JDeveloper using embedded OC4J without any configuration and call MapViewer installed on other domain. Here is the link to MapViewer on OTN: http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/mapviewer/index.html

Well in my project based on ADF BC + ADF Faces I am using also Oracle Maps. Oracle Maps has very rich JavaScript API so in most cases it's enough just to use this API and to only solve communication between Maps and surrounding ADF components. But sometimes we need some special functionality that is not included in Oracle Maps API.

I needed to highlight some subtotal rows in table to get better orientation in sea of numbers. I couldn't find solution to change the style of cells' border or background colour so I helped myself by changing colour of font in those rows. It is not perfect solution but at least something.

Oracle Maps JavaScript API provide us with info window where we can show data related to feature of interest we click on. But if we want to show more complex data the simple bubble is not enough.

If you google around the Internet and find the reference to your work it makes you feel proud of it.

Oracle Maps is a part of Oracle Application Server MapViewer - the tool that visualize spatial data stored in Oracle Database using Oracle Locator or Spatial. What I like very much on Locator/Spatial is that I, as a GIS non-expert, can use Locator/Spatial just through SQL.

Oracle Maps has a rich JavaScript API so with it we even don't need SQL to visualize spatial data. Since it is JavaScript client, we can integrate it to HTML/JSP/JSF/ADF Faces application. Furthermore it is based on AJAX technology and uses Map Cache server so you can develop "google like" maps.

If you (or a member of your team) are an Oracle Reports developer you can leverage your Reports skills also with ADF Faces applications.