VisionX 5 is available It's an awesome version with so many new features and new possibilities. We had some hard months but now it's done and it's available for everyone. We made the decision to wait a little bit longer with VisionX 5 because of changes in used frameworks.

The new Version is more web centric than any version before, but it's not a web tool. VisionX 5 still supports Desktop application creation.

So what's new?

• Default Stylesheet

  All new applications will contain an empty application.css. This file could be used to add custom HTLM5 application styles.

• New CSS Editor (Web settings)

  The new CSS editor makes it possible to change the style of the application directly within VisionX. The Editor supports Search/Replace/Goto line. It's also supported to reload the application in the browser. Simply test your style changes immediately.

  

  CSS Editor

  It supports syntax highlighting and auto completion. Read more...

• New default Theme for HTML5

  Newly created applications will use the new default theme "valo" as standard theme. It's possible to change the theme in web settings wizard.

• Additional Themes

  VisionX 5 is shipped with following themes: Standard, Valo, Valo (small), Mobile

• Navigation

  The page navigation is now enabled by default. It support Back/Forward Browser navigation for the application.

• New Tabset navigation

  It's also possible to enable tabset navigation. This feature enables Back/Forward navigation for tab sheets. This feature is disabled by default. It can be found in the web settings.

• Favicon

  It wasn't easy to change the favicon for your application because it is stored in different locations. VisionX 5 solves this problem because it's possible to change the favicon directly in VisionX.

  

  Favicon support

  It's also possible to use the favicon as icon for desktop applications. VisionX will extract the image directly from the favicon.

• New GUI element: Menu Button

  The Menu Button is a simple button which shows a popup menu if you click the button. The component itself also supports a default action, but this is a new feature of JVx' UIPopupMenuButton. The component is available in the elements area.

  

  Menu Button

• New Web Elements

  The web elements is a new element area. The elements are preconfigured components like an Insert Button. This Button simply inserts a new record in a table. This web elements will work for desktop applications as well, but are often used in web applications.

  

  Web Elements

• New web element: Table Menu Button

  The Table Menu Button is a Menu Button with preconfigured menu items like Delete, Export. It's also possible to add custom menu items via menu customizer.

  

  Table Menu Button Items

• Menubar Image

  It's now possible to configure the web menus independent of the desktop menu. Every screen has a menu icon and a toolbar icon. The menu icon will be used for the menubar and the toolbar icon for the toolbar in Desktop applications.

  The HTML5 application has different layout modes. The standard, the corporation and the legacy mode. The standard mode shows the menu in a sidebar on the left or right of the browser frame. This sidebar was used as toolbar in versions before VisionX 5. If you did configure a toolbar image, the screen was shown as image in the toolbar of your Desktop application and in the sidebar of your HTML5 application. It wasn't possible to configure an image, only, for the HTML5 sidebar. This feature is now available in the menu settings wizard.

  

  Web Menubar

  The toolbar image will be used for the toolbar in the corporation mode, as usual.

• New Edit Panel Customizer

  The Edit Panel now supports a Navigation mode: Single click, Double click and No navigation.

  

  Customizer

  It's also possible to morp an Edit Panel into a Tabset, a simple Panel or a Group Panel.

• All/No columns

  It's now possible to show/hide all columns of a table via customizer. It wasn't nice to click through e.g. 50 columns. Now it's easy to show only 2 columns of e.g. 50 columns.

  

  Show/Hide all

• Default image mapping for HTML5

  It was possible to map desktop images for e.g. HTML5. It's better to use simple/flat images in web applications compared to desktop applications. The web style should be or is different to standard desktops.

  With VisionX 5, we did the default mapping for you and a standard web application will show different standard images.

  

  Image mapping

  Same application, no changes necessary. Only some image mappings!

• FontAwesome support

  JVx has FontAwesome support for a while, but this feature wasn't integrated in VisionX. The new image chooser supports FontAwesome.

  

  FontAwesome

• Custom image libraries

  It's now supported to extend VisionX with custom image libraries. We have different commercial AddOns in our Solution store.

  

  Image library AddOns

The libraries will extend the image chooser.



Extended Image chooser

It's also possible to integrate your own offline image libraries.

• New tutorials

  We have new tutorials and new Tutorial Applications in our Store.

• New Edit Panel features

  The integrated edit panel has new features like Tab Navigation by Buttons. The edit dialog now has OK and Cancel. It supports single our double click navigation.

• Server actions and DB functions

  Our action editor now supports (Oracle) database function calls and server-side function calls.

  

  Server Actions

• Better Action Code Editor

  The source code editor now supports syntax highlighting and code folding.

  

  Action Code Editor

• New Button options

  It's now possible to change the button border behaviour.

  

  Button options

• New Search Options

  The search field now supports Contains and Starts with.

  

  Search options

• Better HTML5 default styling

  We improved the Split Panels and fixed some problems with focus.

  

  HTML5 Styling

  The split handle is now small.

• Vaadin 8

  Our HTML5 GUI is now based on Vaadin 8.1 instead of Vaadin 7. With Vaadin 8, the UI is faster and supports all modern AddOns from the Vaadin Directory.

  We offer a Vaadin AddOn for VisionX to integrate AddOns from the directory.

• New HTML5 layouting mechanism

  We rewrote the layout mechanism of our HTML5 UI because our Form Layout didn't support all available features. Now it's possible to overlap elements or to work with Anchors directly. The new layout mechanism can be disabled if necessary. In this case, the old mechanism will be used.

• Documentation

  The online documentation is now available.

  

  Documentation

• Library updates

  JVx changes, VaadinUI changes

VisionX 5 still contains Applet and Webstart support, but with VisionX 6 we will remove Applet support because the technology is EOL.

The new Version of VisionX will require a new license. Simply ask your sales contact to get a new one. The download area already contains links to VisionX 5 binaries.

Please report any problems as usual and have fun with VisionX 5.

The next big update of VisionX will be available by the end of this week.

We have awesome features for you and your applications.

Some impressions:

New Web Elements		New Tutorial Apps
More Web Settings		FontAwesome Support
New Web Menubar support

More details will be available in the next days

The support for ANT and JRE6 with Eclipse Oxygen.2 (December 2017).

The plugin was created for:

Don't forget the -clean start (read the original article for more details)!

One more thing you should do:

Oxygen.1 and Oxygen.2 contain ANT 1.10.1. This version requires Java 8. In order to use Java 6, you have to download ANT 1.9.x. Simply download ANT and set the ANT Home to your version, via

If you try to use the bundled ANT with JRE 6, it will fail with an Exception.

Download the plugin from here. It works for us - no warranty!

More Details: Eclipse Oxygen.1 with ANT and JRE6

We showed you the upcoming CSS edit feature of VisionX. This feature was used in our new tutorial Style Invoice application.

The standard Invoice application was more or less a standard VisionX application with some standard colors and icons. Not super fancy.

The Styled Invoice application demonstrates how easy it can be to apply your own Style to an application, created with VisionX.

The new tutorial is available in our documentation system.

The standard application:

Standard Invoice application

The styled application:

Styled Invoice application

The upcoming release of VisionX will support CSS styling. We'll show you a first impression with a short video:

The editor supports autocompletion and syntax highlighting:

VisionX CSS Editor

We did integrat the RSyntaxTextArea for this. If you want to know how this works, check the documentation.

Transactions are an integral mechanism of databases, without them we could hardly ensure data consistency. Well, we could of course, but it would be a lot more work. JDBC has of course support for transactions, but it also supports so called "Savepoints", which we will have a look at today.

What are transactions?

Normally, I'd assume that everyone of you knows what transactions are and what they are used for, but today I will quickly rehash it to make sure. Transactions enable us to define groups of statements to be executed on a database with all either succeeding or all failing. Imagine the following statements which might be executed on a database as one action:

1: Insert record into A
2: Update record of B
3: Update another record of B
4: Insert record into C

This might happen in the background if you click a button or do something similar. This example is straightforward but if we start thinking about possible problems we will soon realize that there is a lot of potential for things going wrong. For example if statement #3 would fail we would miss records in the tables B and C. Overall, our data would be in an inconsistent state after that. To make sure that it does not happen, we can define these statements as a single transaction.

Transaction
  |-Insert record into A
  |-Update record of B
  |-Update another record of B
  |-Insert record into C
  \-Commit

If one of these statements fail, all changes done by previous statements can be undone and the database will return to the state before we started manipulating it. That is great, because we can now guarantee that even though an error has happened, the data will remain in a consistent state.

We could even extend that with additional application logic, for example we insert three records and then we check if the values of all records add up to a certain threshold, if yes, we simply undo the changes. Or if we notice that a constraint has been violated (though, pretty much all databases support constraint definitions in one way or the other). Additionally, transactions are completely isolated from all other connected clients. That means that if we start a transaction and insert a record into table A, all other clients will not see this record until we commit our changes. So the data is never in an inconsistent state, not even temporarily or transiently.

What are Savepoints?

Savepoints are sub-transactions within another transaction. It allows to undo parts of an ongoing transaction.

Another example:

Transaction
  |-Insert record into A
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert another record into A
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert another record into A
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert child record into B
  \-Commit

This is a little bit more fabricated and complicated, assume we want to insert three master records with two detail records each. The following conditions apply:

• If a master record fails to insert, nothing should be inserted.
• If a detail record fails to insert, the corresponding master record should also not be inserted.

This is hard to do with a simple transaction, but is quite easy when it comes to using savepoints:

Transaction
  |-Savepoint 1
  |   |-Insert record into A
  |   |-Insert child record into B
  |   \-Insert child record into B
  |-Savepoint 2
  |   |-Insert another record into A
  |   |-Insert child record into B
  |   \-Insert child record into B
  |-Savepoint 3
  |   |-Insert another record into A
  |   |-Insert child record into B
  |   \-Insert child record into B
  \-Commit

We create a savepoint before the insert of the master record, if the insert of the master record fails we rollback the transaction, if the insert of a detail record fails we rollback to the savepoint we created earlier. This allows quite complicated and nested transactions, especially because there is no defined limit to how deep savepoints can be nested.

Error behavior

Of course it can always happen that a statement fails for one reason or another, so it is important to know how the database behaves once an error occurred. We built ourselves another simple example:

Transaction
  |-Insert record into A
  |-Insert record into B (this fails)
  |-Insert record into C
  \-Commit

We insert three records, and the second one fails to insert. How should the database behave in such a situation? Turns out that this differs between different database systems.

Silent/Automatic restore to a previous state

Many databases perform a simple "silent/automatic restore to a previous state", all changes done (if any) of the current statement are undone and the transaction can be treated like the failing statement never happened. With the example above, and assuming that we do not cancel the transaction on an error, the records would be inserted into A and C.

In our tests Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, H2 and SQLite were all behaving this way.

Requiring manual recovery

PostgresSQL requires to perform a "manual recovery" from a failed statement. So that once an error occurred during a transaction, the user has to revert to a (manually) set savepoint or rollback the complete transaction. We will go into details on that later.

Reverting everything and happily continuing

MS SQL on the other hand has a quite different approach. When an error occurs during a transaction, all changes are (automatically) rolled back but the transaction can still be used. So in our example, only the record in C would be inserted.

PostgreSQL JDBC and Savepoints

Back to PostgresSQL and how it requires manual recovery. When a statement fails within a transaction in PostgreSQL, the transaction enters the aborted state and one can then see an error like the one below if further statements are issued:

Current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block.

What that means is simple that the connection/server is still waiting on input on what to do with the transaction. There are three possible ways to recover from there:

1. Rollback the complete transaction
2. Commit, which will be transformed into a rollback at this point
3. Rollback to a savepoint

But these actions must be initiated by the user before the transaction can be further used (or not, if it is being rolled back completely). If one wants to emulate the behavior of other databases in PostgreSQL, every statement that is executed within a transaction has to be "wrapped" with a savepoint, in pseudo-code:

Even though that seems tedious, that is not the case. If you have such a requirement you already have central point through which all statements pass before being executed, so this can be implemented easily.

JVx and Savepoints

In our case it is DBAccess, our main datasource. Because every database interaction has to pass through DBAccess (in one way or the other), we could easily implement such emulation at a low-level and it is automatically available to all users. To be exact, DBAccess has received internal support to wrap all statements in savepoints when configured to do so. This configuration possibility is protected and is currently only used by the PostgresSQL DBAccess extension. It does exactly what it says on the tin and is only active when enabled and automatic commits have been turned off. So this change does have no effect on any other database but PostgreSQL.

We already have plans to extend this basic savepoint support with a public API which allows users of JVx to utilize this new functionality. One of the ideas that we are currently discussing is to provide the ability to create named savepoints. A simple mockup of that idea:

As said, we are currently in the process of discussing such possibilities but definitely want to provide such an API at one point.

Conclusion

As it turns out, the "special" behavior of PostgreSQL isn't as special as it seems to be. It is a design decision that was taken and that is understandable. Changing this behavior now, 20+ years in, is out of the question as it would require a substantial effort to make sure that this behavior is backwards compatible. The gains from such a change on the other hand would be very little, as it is a quite specialized case in which this behavior matters and the "fix" is rather easy.

We have a new AddOn for all VisionX users. It's the Embedding AddOn.

The new AddOn makes it possible to embedd one work-screen into another work-screen. Simply re-use screens in other screens.

Get an impression

The AddOn is commercial and not included in VisionX. Contact our sales team to get more information!

Some years ago, we put all our documentation into our Forum. This wasn't a perfect system for our documentation, but it was in one place. But now we know that the Forum was a bad idea for framework and product documentation.

Last year, we started an evaluation for a new documentation system and were shocked about the quality and features of available solutions. We found a SaaS solution but we didn't want to store our documentation elsewhere. After some research we made a decission and our new documentation system was DokuWiki. The system itself is very nice but the standard theme is not pretty. But it's pluggable and there are many nice looking themes and very useful plugins.

After some customization we were very happy with the result and the migration from our Forum to the DokuWiki was not a hard task. It's still in progress, but we're happy to announce that our new docu system is available for you!

The new link is https://doc.sibvisions.com/

The new system contains some many information about VisionX as well. We didn't publish this information in the past.

Have fun with our new documentation system!

Our Forum will be continued, but only as place for questions and answers.

DokuWiki

is a simple to use and highly versatile Open Source wiki software that doesn't require a database.

It's a really nice software for your documentation. The default theme isn't super modern, but it works. There are many custom themes available and styling is simple.

The really cool thing is the remote API of DokuWiki. It has a XML based RPC interface. Here are some details.

The documentation looks promise. There's a Java example
But the last update of the Java client was 2016

After downloading and testing the client, it was clear that it doesn't work. It had a problem with cookie management. I tried to fix the problem in the base lib - aXMLRPC but it was tricky. The problem was the standard Http URL connection. After replacing it with Apache HttpClient, the dokujclient was working without problems.
I didn't try to find the root cause of the problem because it wasn't worth the time. It was faster to replace the communication part.

Here's a link to our patch and all required libraries (pre-built).

Here's a short snippet

We use the remote interface for automatic article updates. It works great!

We're happy to announce the release of EPlug 1.2.7. This minor update comes with a big performance improvement!

Major performance improvement

The most notable and important feature of this release is the major speed improvement when checking files. We've revisited how the build pipeline works and could determine quite a few bottlenecks which did not only encumber the build process, but also the live checks of databooks. After fixing these bottlenecks the databook live checks are blazing fast and one does not notice any more that these are active.

While reviewing the code, we also saw the possibility for a few more tweaks which we will incorporate into the next major release, to squeeze even more performance out of this.

Improved DataBook View

The DataBook view has also received some much needed attention. There is now a toolbar button which allows to sort the columns by their name (instead of their order as returned by the datasource). Additionally the view does no longer flicker when refreshing and will also clear itself when the last editor closes.

Other fixes

1. There is no longer a sleeping EPlug job in the Progress View.
2. The EPlug preferences are now only available on Java projects.
3. If there is no screen lifecycle object, the session object is now used.
4. Removed raw HTML in tooltips.

How to get it?

Simply update EPlug via Eclipse!