Page templates: html vs layout components

[koen.verhulst]

All,

We often make a difference between skinning components (the real skinning) and creating a general layout for an ADF applications.

In various projects, the creation of a general layout is done by using plain html (divs,..) in the page template.

Lots of customers have specific wishes if it comes down to the global look and feel of an (ADF) web application. By using the ADF layout components, it's often a quite difficult and time consuming task to fulfil the customers layout requirement. Therefore we choose to use plain html in the page template, fast resulting in pretty look and feel, which fulfil customers requirements.

Since JSF 2.0 introduces facelets, it should be possible to mix html tags and JSF tags, so I don't really understand why Oracle states that mixing ADF Faces components and html tags is bad practice.

I wonder:

> What are the main disadvantages with this approach?

> Why does oracle chooses to use divs in the "Alta tablet first template?" 

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/jdev/documentation/121300-rn-2112062.html -> Tablet First Template (18764235,18924776,17684633):

"The new tablet first template three issues that need to be fixed.  The template is using DIV tags which are not good practice in ADF.  These div tags need to be replaced with panelGroupLayout=vertical.  In addition, the .contentContainer styleclass specified in the tabletFirstTemplate.css has text-align property that needs to be removed. This is causing problems when components which do not have the text-align overridden are used as content (ie. tabs). "

It seems that using divs is even faster for oracle to develop a template. Otherwise layout component would have been used directly instead.

My question to the group is: 

> how do you setup a general application layout?

> do you like working with layout components?

> are there any know disadvantages in your approach?

Customers just want create looking applications and developers dont - imho - want to spend hours and hours trying to implement a design suggested by a designer.

Looking forward to the responses.

Regards,

Koen Verhulst

[Shay Shmeltzer]

When you use HTML directly you take away the control that ADF has over the page.

We use this control to do things like internalization (right-to-left) support, automatically achieving stretching or flow layout, skinning and other aspects.

Have you looked into the new PanelGridLayout for layouting your pages? It provides a much simpler way to create page layouts that is much more aligned with the "HTML approach". Have a look for example at this demo: Developing Your First Oracle Alta UI page with Oracle ADF Faces 

As the release notes indicate the div in that template is a bug from our perspective and will be removed in future versions - there is really no need for it in the tablet.

[Florin Marcus]

Hi Koen,

By using HTML tags within facelets you will give up maintainability coming through ADF Skinning, but if you insist going that way, it should work and you should not see any side effects by doing it. Simply because JSF supports it, therefore ADF should support it too.

Myself, while I am not what you would call a Web Designer, I am pretty confident I can bend pretty much any HTML Layout into an ADF Skin, even though it might take me couple of days to do it. I've seen CSS experts doing it in a matter of hours. 

Thanks,

Florin

 

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[koen.verhulst]

Hi Florin, Shay,

thanks for the replies.

I will have a look at the PanelGridLayout. However, our current approach seems to work and we have not yet found any disadvantages and our current 'main' template works completely responsive as well.

Kind regards,

Koen

Op donderdag 6 november 2014 18:34:01 UTC+1 schreef Florin Marcus:

[dand...@gmail.com]

 

Hi All,

I have achieved responsive also,not only for page template and done with inner pages also.Using panel group layouts,Controlled the layouts using media queries css3.0 concept.

Mostly i used float concept to achieve responsive and container width precentages(%) instead of pixels.

Iz it good pracitce using float concept for panelgroup layouts or other components?

Thanks,

Venkatesh Dandu