Design Responsively

Use the Oracle Alta UI design system to implement a mobile-first strategy for web applications.

User interfaces (UIs) in smartphones and tablets are constrained by the device display size, lack of a physical keyboard, and use of finger gestures instead of mouse pointers. For these reasons, native mobile UIs are usually designed more simply and cleanly, and with more visuals, than equivalent desktop UIs. Mobile UIs tend to focus more on the display of information that is derived from data than on the data itself—the opposite of what most desktop UIs provide.

To reduce the development effort and shorten the time to market for mobile business applications, development teams often build web applications that can run in both desktop and mobile browsers. To ensure user acceptance of such applications, developers should consider implementing a UI design that is optimized for mobile—an approach known as a mobile-firststrategy. Mobile-first does not mean mobile-only. Mobile-first designs are less cluttered than traditional desktop interfaces. Page navigation is mobile-friendly and avoids page scroll bars and horizontal scrolling. And a mobile-first design uses scripts and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement responsive layouts—which automatically adapt to the device on which they’re displayed.

With the release of Oracle JDeveloper 12.1.3, Oracle Alta UI is now available. Oracle Alta UI is a design system and set of guidelines that promote a mobile-first design for Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) web applications. Oracle Alta UI helps you build simpler UIs that enable application users to scan information quickly and perform work actions more easily.

This column provides an overview of Oracle Alta UI for the Oracle ADF Faces feature of Oracle ADF and gives you hands-on experience with building Oracle Alta UI–designed UIs with Oracle ADF.

About Oracle Alta UI Design

Oracle ADF pages and views are rendered by Oracle ADF Faces, a JavaServer Faces (JSF) component framework that abstracts details of the UI rendering from the business application itself. Oracle ADF Faces components intelligently handle the layout geometry management and user interactions on desktop and mobile browsers. With Oracle Alta UI, Oracle ADF web applications have a new look and feel  in addition to a rich set of mobile-optimized and redesigned Oracle ADF Faces components, CSS, scripts, and developer best practices for implementing a mobile-first design strategy.