So whilst skinning spaces I came across a small annoyance - I don’t think you could class it as bug, but here it is.

Within your Trinidad skin if you finish a selector with a “,” - ie

af|toolbar, af|panelbox, { border:solid 3px red }

and then deploy you updated skin; the next time you access your application  a blank page will be displayed.

Adding a comma to the end of your CSS on a standard website would just invalidate the CSS parameters.

Reviewing the log files should give you an error message about trinidad selectors.

Whilst skinning Spaces I came across a simple issue where the adf panelbox did not appear to be rendering the DOM for the footer - even though I could find this documented everywhere…?

What I soon discovered is that this was caused by the default renderkit chosen which by default for Spaces apears to be the Trinidad render kit? Strange; because Oracle have their own render-kit for Webcenter 11g - oracle.adf.rich. And as Spaces is based on ADF not Trinidad I would of thought that Spaces would of been written on the oracle.adf.rich render-er?

By changing the render-kit from trinidad to oracle.adf.rich the DOM model within spaces is updated to show the footer. There were a few minor skin alterations required but at least I now have additional tags I needed to assist with the skinning and adding a footer.

Here are all of the render-kits I am aware of:
oracle.adf.core
oracle.adf.pda
oracle.adf.desktop
oracle.adf.rich
org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.core
org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.pda
org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.desktop

At the moment I don’t know what the differences are - there doesn’t seem to be much documentation on this - but from what I hear if you are developing for iphone use the trinidad renderkits they are lighter - although maybe have a look at oracle.adf.pda see if there are any nice things there as well and do a comparison.

Since September 2009 I have been working on a small game engine - which I hope to release as open source - after its predicted beta test release date

The engine is ie6+ compatible and of course works in all other browsers - so far tested and working in ie6+, FF, Opera, Chrome, Safari. k.

Here is a quick mini teaser of the dev environment::

I was on Ajaxian today and saw another engine built on similar technologies as mine - the Aves Engine. It’s still very early days for me and at the moment there are only 2 of us on the project but who knows we`ll see how it goes. You could always use mine as a free alternative if you are thinking of developing a nice web based game

We are also working on a mini game for the engine so you will be able to see the power of the engine in use.
We are using a slight different approach working with jetanhex (hexagon) tiles instead of the standard square isometric tiles which seems to work quite well for us as you can see in the mouse over examples in the above demo.

Ps. For some reason when I was recording the movement of the browser seemed to stager? But as soon as I stopped recording the game dynamics and scrolling appeared to be extremely smooth.

New blogger on the scene - another RSS feed to get added!

The Oracle Mack

Early days so keep watching..

Just in..
For those of you fedup of no colour coding or code completion within the UCM component manager - Arnoud Koot at Oracle has released a nice free extension for notepad++

[Via Kyle's Blog on Universal Content Management]

Download a copy of the extension here.