Open World Abstract...

I have submitted an abstract for Oracle Open World. I want to do an instructive paper on how to do custom component development. I think I still have a lot to learn; I had read a chapter or two and done some exercises and examples and thought I knew what I was doing. At the time I learned these basics I felt very proud of them. Now I feel sheepish for feeling proud, since I now know definitively some things which then I only kind of knew.

At the height of my smugness I decided I would try and extend a rich faces component…that did not work out quite as well as I had hoped. I was able to put markup before and after the af:table (rich table, that is), but I cannot seem (yet) to figure out how to get into the middle of it – inside the box where the columns are or in-between the columns. I thought I knew where to look for this, but I am not finding what I expected when I look where I thought I should.

So far my efforts to augment these components have met with very limited success. There is a section in the Fusion Developers ADF Guide 11g about extending components (I hope they mean UI components and not business components) that I should read for sure and probably reference. Maybe that will give me some insight. Maybe for my understanding level, it would be more helpful to attendees if I stick with more basic concepts, like how the pieces I know about interact.

I know the declarative components are custom component combinations, which is quite handy. I have a 10g project where I could really use something like that. Maybe that is something I can explore for my paper: implementing declarative component conceptually, in order to help understand custom component development.

For my edification however I would like to know more details on how Oracle implemented their rich components. When I try to alter them or get inside of them, everything I do seems to not allow me to get at the inner parts of the component. I do not know how Oracle is hiding this.
For starters I see that there are property elements in the components when they are defined in faces-config.xml. I did not know that component properties could be define or elaborated on there. I do not know what that adds, but I would like to know.

I should study JSF details from the Java EE 5.0 tutorial. Hopefully they would have some further explanation of this. Or maybe the standards for Java EE 5.0: maybe they specify some details of JSF that would help me understand what Oracle and everybody else is doing with their components…and help me with this paper.