3 Ways Oracle Is Making Mobile App Projects Easier in Visual Builder

As early and avid adopters of Oracle’s tools for progressive web apps (including mobile apps), we’re excited to share the next set of steps the organization has taken to streamline development. Here are several areas to explore if your dev team wants to take full advantage of Visual Builder. 

#1 Certification: Learn Redwood Like a Pro

This is the favorite theme our team uses for web and mobile app development since it delivers a look, feel, and experience of a professional native app. It’s visually appealing, easy to use, and very feature rich. It is ideal for building low-code, no-code apps using JET components for rapid mockups and drag and drop tools to build your desired user experience. 

Oracle now offers Redwood Certification to ensure development teams can rapidly learn and implement this design system in their future Visual Builder projects.

Here’s what the course covers:

• Introduction to the Redwood Design System
• Overview of Oracle Fusion Cloud Apps extensions with the Visual Builder platform
• A training on using Oracle Visual Builder Studio to create applications
• A deeper dive into using Redwood's templates, patterns, and components
  

   

Learn more about the Oracle’s Redwood certification and get started here.

#2 Performance Enhancements for Developers

Shay Shmeltzer, Director of Product Management at Oracle, had several pieces of good news to share earlier this year about Declarative Javascript Action Chains. The new version of Visual Builder creates JavaScript code from the visual action chain editor. Developers now have direct access to edit and add JavaScript code. The upshot is that a declarative approach to development makes it faster and easier to create layout and logic for applications. 

• Simpler Visualization: You can see the entire logic structure as an overview without zooming in and out on the diagram, making it easier to pinpoint and navigate to a specific action.
  
  
• Easier Design: You can now create local functions using a drag and drop action and then call that function from other places in the action chain.
  
  
• Better Debugging: JavaScript action chains mean you can leverage the browser’s JS debugger to simplify tracking and resolving issues in your logic.
  
  
• Greater Control: Finally, using git code version management is also easier with JS action chains. This benefit is of special interest to large teams collaborating on an app. 

Watch this 8 minute video to see a breakdown of all the new capabilities. 

#3 More Modular Approach to Coding 

Fragmentation usually has negative connotations, but not when it comes to Oracle’s Visual Builder. Fragments are actually very helpful for creating reusable page areas. This win for modularity means you can create a “fragment”, mark it to be reusable across multiple extensions, and then leverage it in as many AppUI extensions as you want. 

See how the process of using Fragments works here. 

Here’s an example of when something like a fragment comes in handy. For example, if you have a login box that is on many pages of an application, you would want to have one fragment that is just the login box. Then, if you need to make a change (such as increasing the font size), you would change it in the fragment and it would update on every page. 

Why is such a small thing such a big deal? The modularity and reusability of these micro functions act as project accelerators which allows our team to develop mobile and web applications at a fraction of the time (and cost) of traditional development. It’s not unusual for us to build an app in 2-3 weeks instead of 6-8 months. Saving our clients an astonishing amount of money and time while delivering highly functional and maintainable custom apps is definitely worthwhile!

Want to learn more about our app development services? Go here.