A lot of people have asked me this question or a variation of this question which goes like.
- How do I learn Open UI?
- How do I start with Open UI?
- I want to learn Siebel Open UI, should I start with bookshelf?
You get the drift. I thought it might help to share the answer that I give them.
My Answer:
Learning Open UI is bit different from traditional Siebel. In normal circumstances one would be asked to read bookshelf or visit Siebel Essentials or Siebel Unleashed 
to learn Siebel but not in case Open UI (although that would certainly change in future). I will not ask you to touch bookshelf until much later.
As we all know Siebel Open UI is a new layer of UI based on HTML 5.0 standards that provides browser independence and great many other features. These other features (commit on step off, Notifications, Tiles Layout) are achieved by use AJAX, jQuery Plugins (JQ Grid for list applets) and Proxy JavaScript classes designed by Oracle (buscomp.js, view.js).
Above information means that in order truly understand and develop in Siebel Open UI we first have to understand the technologies that make it tick. In other words you have to primarily understand following technologies
- HTML
- CSS
- jQuery
- AJAX
When I learnt about Open UI for the first time I knew that jQuery will be integral part of it and I started honing my jQuery skills by reading about it. Reading was OK but what really helped me setting myself a target to build small application that used all of these technologies. It could be a really simple project such a building a sign-up form.
For HTML & CSS learn about frameworks such as Bootstrap. For AJAX you can setup WAMP (web server and MySQL DB). Get your hands dirty with jQuery and AJAX and try to implement simple things such as Accordian.
I would give around 2-4 weeks for this phase of learning. Once you are comfortable with terms like selectors, filters, parent, delegate, bind, closest, overflow, font-family, border, display block/inline then you know you are ready for next part. Now, the basic structure of PM and PR would start making sense. One thing that you can do to test if you got the basics right or not is to un-minify any Oracle class file such as buscomp.js, view.js etc and see if the code there makes any sense. Don’t expect to understand much but even if you are able to make sense of few things that means you are in right direction.
Next step is then to move to Open UI bookshelf (yes, you can start it finally) and start implementing basic PR and PM. I can assure that this additional effort to understand the basics would go a long way in saving time and effort later.
In case you have already been asked to start developing in Open UI then I would suggest start following Siebel-Essentials closely there are really good examples and basics to get you started and keep learning these technologies parallely.
Have different thoughts or have something to add? Head to the comments section below and make the difference.