Dedicated to all my family, friends, and Charlotte.
To Berni, your spirit and determination continue to influence us all.
Practical Oracle JET will walk you through the process of developing a functional application, using Oracle’s JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET). Rather than being a typical theoretical book, it will guide you through the practical creation of a complete support ticket system, using a variety of different components bundled with the toolkit, including lists, inputs, and visualizations. The skills acquired from reading this book and working the examples will equip you to build your own applications and take your understanding even further to more advanced topics.
A basic knowledge of JavaScript is expected before proceeding with this book. The technologies that JET uses under the hood will be explored, and complete code will be given in a chapter-by-chapter format on GitHub or JSFiddle (where specified).
I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in the journey of putting this project together. A special thank you to my colleagues at Griffiths Waite for their support and guidance from the get-go, especially to Andrew Bennett and Rich Barber.
Thank you to my amazing girlfriend, Charlotte, who has not only had to put up with the late nights of writing but also created the book illustrations and given much needed encouragement along the way.
To my parents and family, thank you so much for your support always.
Finally, a thank you to Nick Dobson, for pushing me to do this; to Ian Watson, for proofreading; and to Reece Jacques, Oliver Butler, and James Potts, for being the best support network anyone could ask for.
Table of Contents
About the Author and About the Technical Reviewer
About the Author
is a front-end developer specializing in Oracle’s JavaScript Extension Toolkit (JET). He has had an interest in technology from an early age, particularly web development, for which he taught himself PHP, MySQL, and HTML back in 2008. This eventually led him to build web sites for customers, alongside his studies throughout A levels and university.
Since graduating, he now has more than five years’ experience working with different Oracle front-end technologies, including Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF), WebCenter Portal, and WebCenter Sites. He works for Griffiths Waite, a company based in Birmingham, UK, developing solutions for a number of enterprise customers. Daniel has most recently been involved in modernizing applications in Oracle JET and has written articles on the technology for Medium, the Oracle developer publication.
About the Technical Reviewer
is an open source enthusiast working at Oracle and, before that, Sun Microsystems. Since starting at Sun Microsystems in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2004, he has primarily focused on writing documentation and training materials for the free and open source NetBeans IDE. Gradually, as he participated in conferences and began setting up workshops, especially on the use of NetBeans IDE for the development of Java applications, as well as introductions to the NetBeans APIs and the development of large Java Swing desktop applications on top of the NetBeans platform, he grew into a developer advocacy and product management role and specialized in Java and the tooling requirements connected to NetBeans IDE in support of Java.
When Oracle took over Sun Microsystems, and the developer ecosystem began to embrace JavaScript as a useful language and ecosystem for the development of enterprise applications, NetBeans IDE was repositioned to provide tooling for JavaScript as much as it had for Java. Oracle’s strategy for JavaScript was developed and expanded over the years into an in-house front-end technology stack called Oracle JET. When Oracle JET was made available for external use as a free and open source technology stack, Geertjan joined the related product management team at Oracle, focusing specifically on promoting Oracle JET to the Oracle ecosystem and beyond.
In the meantime, Oracle decided to share the cost of ownership of NetBeans IDE and, accordingly, donated it to the Apache Software Foundation. Together with his focus on promoting Oracle JET, Geertjan has been leading the NetBeans IDE transition of NetBeans IDE to the Apache Software Foundation from within Oracle.
Through his experiences with customers, partners, and conferences, Geertjan has seen the strengths of the JavaScript ecosystem, as well as its gaps in the enterprise ecosystem. He has seen time and again how enterprises value Oracle JET’s enterprise-grade features and functionalities, and this continues to enthuse him in his role as product manager for Oracle JET.