HANA Express is available for some days. HANA is the In-Memory Database solution of SAP.

What is HANA Express?

SAP HANA, express edition is a streamlined version of SAP HANA that can run on laptops and other resource-constrained hosts, such as a cloud-hosted virtual machine, for free up to 32G of memory use.

reference: https://go.sap.com/developer/topics/sap-hana-express.html

We wrote an article about our HANA experiments in December 2014. We had a test account for the online HANA. Our tests were successful but we weren't convinced from the system because it was slow and had many JDBC driver problems. Our bug reports were never answered.

But we never give up and the Express edition was interesting for us. We thought it might be worth some hours for our R&D team. The result is awesome!

We think that VisionX is the best tool for application development with HANA databases. Your web application is ready in 1 minute without coding!

Some details?

The installation of the Express edition wasn't tricky. The documentation is straight forward. The database is up and running in some minutes.

We had some problems with JDBC driver because it wasn't available as separate download and we didn't find any documentation. But it was part of the HANA plugin for Eclipse. Not that easy, but it was part of a jar file: com.sap.ndb.studio.jdbc_2.3.8.jar.

The next tricky thing was the JDBC connect string: jdbc:sap://hxehost:30013/?currentschema=System. The username was SYSTEM.

With all this information, it was super easy to create an application with VisionX for HANA express. We guess it makes no difference if you use HANA or HANA express.

How it works? Check the video. It's from 2014 but still impressive.

The current JDBC driver works much better than in 2014 and the performance of the database is great - compared to 2014.

If you're interested in more details, write a comment

We're happy to announce the release of EPlug 1.2.5. Even though the change in the version number is quite small, the changes which have gone into this version are very interesting.

Better hover information and improved DataBookView

The biggest visual change in this new version is the new hover information for columns:

As you can see it has been vastly extended, with nearly all information about the column which you might want to know about, including its type, the label and all other properties.

Also the image preview is now more useful and is displaying the complete image but scaled to fit the hover:

Additionally the DataBookView has been restructured to display the information in a more easily digestible way, structured by variable name and source of the columns:

Improved DataBook support

The support for DataBooks/DataRows has been greatly improved and the plugin does now support a lot more variations on how to achieve the metadata. For example cloning of ColumnDefinitions, assigning of RowDefinitions and even getDataRow(...) and similar methods are now processed to acquire the metadata and column information.

Objects in server calls

One of the build-time checks is the type-check of parameters in server calls. Let's look at a simple example:

While this compiles completely fine in pure Java (because callAction(...) does accept an Object vararg), EPlug would flag it with an error because getValue(...) returns an Object but the server-side expects a BigDecimal. With this update there is now a build option available in the Project/EPlug settings to ignore such errors, allowing to pass Objects to the server side without checks.

Misspelled a column name? No problem!

We do now offer QuickFixes for column names with typos:

Automatic check of complement files

There is now a new build option in the Project/EPlug settings which allows to enable the automatic check of complement files. A "complement" file is simply the "other side", for example for the lifecycle-object the complement file is the workscreen, and vice versa. That means that now workscreens are automatically checked if the lifecycle object changes.

Preliminary String array support

There are various functions which do accept a String array of column names, for example getValues(...). Because of limitations coming up from the JDT infrastructure which we are using, we've been unable to provide autocompletion for column names in such circumstances:

We are still unable to determine the exact databook in such circumstances, but we do now simply provide all columns as completion suggestions. What we can do is provide full hover and build support for these functions.

Improved VisionX/EPlug communication

VisionX is now a lot more talkative, it informs EPlug about file changes. If "Auto Reload" is enabled in EPlug, all files that have been changed by VisionX will now be reloaded and checked automatically. The same accounts for changed metadata.

Changes

• Updated JVx version
• Cached MetaData is now correctly invalidated and refreshed
• DataBookView is now not constantly refreshed
• Markers (Errors, Warnings) are now only placed on the names of the columns, instead of the whole statement
• Inserted methods (from quick fixes) should now always be correctly formed
• Fixed "phantom" markers which could pop up during build
• Fixed that the DataBookView might not display all metadata
• Fixed that folding nodes in the DataBookView made the child-nodes vanish
• Various bug fixes

Simply update EPlug via Eclipse!

Vaadin 7.7.0 is out since 2016-08-24 and 7.7.1 since 2016-09-14.

We're happy to announce that our vaadin UI is based on vaadin 7.7.1 since 2016-09-16. Use our nightly builds or checkout the repository.

And the maven snapshots:

Your feedback is appreciated

We have a brand new AddOn for you! It's simply awesome.

Imagine you have a large application with many screens and life-cycle objects. The deployent date is tomorrow. All manual tests today were successful. You leave the office and your colleague updates the database and doesn't tell you something about the changes. The deployment could be a destroyment without retesting!

Sure, a manual test of application functionality is great and also automatic UI tests are helpful. But both tests need some time and a test tool for automatic UI tests. We had the simple idea that a great improvement would be an automatic screen and life-cycle object test by an ANT task.

You could reduce error sources if it's guaranteed that a screen can be opened at runtime! This means that the object in the life-cycle object will work as well. But it's also possible that you have some database access objects in the life-cycle object, without GUI references, e.g. for Reporting purposes. Such objects can't be found with simple screen open tests.

Our idea was that we could check all database objects from your life-cycle objects automatically and we could start the application in a headless mode to open/close your screens. Both checks could be executed as ANT task before war file creation. Sounds interesting?

We have an AddOn with above features for VisionX.

Here are some screenshots of the build results:

Project view with ANT results

The life-cycle object MasterData contains the DBStorage errorData. The storage uses the write-back table ERRORDATA wich isn't available in the database. The quality check shows:

Only the ANT output:

Quality checks ANT results

The life-cycle object had an error, but the MasterDataWorkScreen works because errorData wasn't used while opening the screen.

The screens SimpleErrorWorkScreen and ShowErrorWorkScreen can't be opened because initialization failed. The life-cycle objects work without problems!

The checks are fast and can be executed without GUI. The application will be started with headless UI and it acts like any other JVx application with all supported features.

The AddOn is a massive improvement for your quality requirements.

We're happy to announce that all our projects are available as Maven artifacts.
Not all of our projects are public and aren't available in public Maven repositories, but we offer our own nexus for all this projects.

Which projects aren't public?

• Vaadin Charts UI
• Vaadin responsive application frame
• Application client
• Application server
• Application Services
• JavaFX mobile UI
• Oracle Forms extension

We provide snapshot and release artifacts. All other - public - projects are available via maven central as release or snapshot artifacts.

• JVx
• JVx EE
• Vaadin UI
• JavaFX UI
• Headless UI
• Online help
• JVx mobile

Our private Maven repository is available on a subscription basis. This doesn't mean that our private projects aren't open source projects, but we don't offer snapshot or release artifacts for them!