OOW11 Day 2 Round-up October 9, 2011
Posted by Duncan in Fusion, OOW, PeopleSoft.trackback
Following on from Day 1’s Round-up:
I started off the second day by having another look around the demo grounds. One of the booths had a ‘proof of concept’ demo of how Fusion apps might look on the iPad and it was very impressive. Really slick and gorgeous to look at. I know that there has been a lot of fuss over the Workday iPad functionality, and although I haven’t seen it I fail to see how it could look much better than what was demoed here.
My first session of the day was Best Practices for Using PeopleSoft Test Framework by David Howard and Scott Shafer. They asked for a show of hands at the start, and although a lot of people present were on Tools 8.51 not many had used PTF yet. It was an interesting session and I learnt quite a lot, for instance that PTF is the next version of PS Script (for those that have been around a while) and that it works well with the Usage Monitor to narrow down exactly what needs testing. Other things I didn’t know are that there is a debug mode for stepping through the tests, and that you can use variables to make the tests more repeatable. There are apparently bug fixes for this in each of the Tools8.51 patches, and a lot of nice new functionality coming in Tools 8.52.
Next up was Creating a great PeopleSoft UI with Jim Marion, Robert Taylor, Matthew Haavisto. This was an interesting one for me as I do enjoy the UI side of PeopleSoft. Much was made of Workcenters, Dashboards and the role based branding in Application Portal and how it makes the task a lot simpler (and more dynamic – different users can have different UIs). Rebranding is normally accomplished by a team of 3 – a graphic artist, a web developer (jQuery and XSL) and a PeopleTools expert. They also showed some eye-candy examples of their handiwork:
It seems that the more attractive portions are accomplished by either jQueryUI or XSL (I guess that’s where the Web Developer of the trio comes in). Other tips included not using Query pagelets on the homepage too often as they’re not great for load-time, and use pagelet caching as much as you can (particularly on static HTML based pagelets). They also mentioned that there is a big focus on the UI in upcoming versions, and that some features are going to move from the Applications Portal to PeopleTools.
The PeopleSoft Tipster Blog 