Die Master Thesis von Michael Hofer steht nun öffentlich zur Verfügung. Das Thema war

Design und Implementierung einer Multi-Touch optimierten Android Runtime Umgebung für JVx ERP Applikationen auf Smartphone Devices

Im Zuge seiner Arbeit wurde der JVx.Mobile Server und der Android Client für JVx entwickelt. Das Projekt steht unter der Apache Lizenz 2.0 zur Verfügung.

Die Arbeit ist zugleich eine gute Dokumentation für JVx.mobile und erklärt Designentscheidungen sowie deren Umsetzung.

We want to tell you some fantastic news from our RnD team: The next big step for VisionX will be an IDE integration feature.

Our team is working very hard to reach the goals. The result will be an Eclipse plugin that connects to VisionX and allows bidirectional communication. We won't embedd VisionX in Eclipse because it makes no sense for us, but we'll use the whole power of the IDE.

What will be supported?

• Event links (Eclipse)

  A click on an event action string will jump to the right method.

  databook.eventValuesChanged().addListener(this, "doValuesChanged");

  The click on doValuesChanged will jump to the method in the work-screen.

• Call links (Eclipse)

  A click on an action/object call will jump to the right method, in the right life-cycle object.

  getConnection().callAction("getLicenseInformation");

  The click on getLicenseInformation will jump to the method in the life-cycle object.

• DataBook links (Eclipse)

  A click on the name of a databook will jump to the storage definition, in the life-cycle object.

  RemoteDataBook rdb = new RemoteDataBook();
  rdb.setDataSource(dataSource);
  rdb.setName("users");
  rdb.open();

  The click on users will jump to the DBStorage definition, in the the life-cycle object.

• Auto completion (Eclipse)

  We'll offer auto completion for table columns, event methods, action/object calls, ...

  databook.getRowDefinition().getColumnDefinition("DESCRIPTION").getDataType().setCellEditor(VisionXUtil.MULTILINE_EDITOR);

  It'll be possible to get a list of all available columns, like DESCRIPTION.

• Column checks (Eclipse)

  We'll check if all column names are valid and will show compiler warnings/errors.

• Jump to Eclipse

  It'll be possible, with VisionX, to jump to the source code of e.g. actions, component definitions or databooks in Eclipse. We'll introduce some new Buttons in VisionX, for that feature.

  

  VisionX E-Plug

• Jump to VisionX

  It'll be possible, with Eclipse, to highlight selected GUI components directly in VisionX.

No worries, we have more features for you!

The IDE integration will be available as optional VisionX module.

We have a new feature for you!

It's an API to generate QR codes. The API is available in ProjX and you can easily create custom Contact, Phone number, Text, E-Mail and Geo Location QR codes.

We've some new actions for QR code generation in VisionX to easily use the new API.

It's a cool new feature and we've a new example application in our Solution store, but be careful because you need VisionX 2.0.85, or newer, for this feature.

Here's a screenshot from the application:

QR code generation

Create your own QR codes in seconds!

If you are Liferay User and Vaadin Portlet developer, you know that Liferay has Vaadin bundled. If you develop a Vaadin portlet, you should use the bundled Vaadin version, otherwise it'll be a problem after a deployment.

We solved the problem in JVx' VaadinUI by extending Vaadin. Our implementation allows different Vaadin versions independent of Liferay. Some days ago, Matti Tahvonen posted an article about Using "self-contained" approach to package Vaadin portlets. This is an interesting article because it's exactly what we tried to do and we thought that Vaadin developers have a better solution for the problem!

And of course, their solution is better than ours But we are like copy cats and we changed our solution because it reduced code and made it easier for us to maintain our codebase. Our idea was not far away from the recommended solution, but we did too much.

To find out what Vaadin did in their archetype, we followed their posted instructions. We found two steps that could be ignored. The first step was the creation of a custom maven profile because it was possible to add all properties to the pom.xml of the project. The second step was the configuration of the profile in Eclipse. Not needed if properties were added to pom.xml.

And after creating the project, we had the recommended solution and it was absoutely trivial. Simply extend VaadinPortlet, extend VaadinPortletService and override getStaticFileLocation. The created source code:

To be honest... our solution contained a little bit more code but it worked. We've used our new knowledge to improve our solution, because it should be possible to use "self-contained" and "shared" approach without additional source code. We introduced a context parameter to switch between modes. Vaadin could do the same, but currently it's not implemented.

Our new solution is as simple as the original Vaadin source code and the most important thing is that it works with our ant build.

It was a very simple task. The library Twitter4j (4.0.1) was compiled for Java 6 and I need a 1.5 compatible version. So, I thought it shouldn't be a problem to compile the project with 1.5 compatibility
Twitter4j is available via git and after cloning and switching to 4.0.1 everything was available. I tried to import the maven project with Eclipse (Kepler) and got many problems because of missing libraries. WTF?

Shouldn't maven solve all dependency problems? I didn't try to fix problems with Eclipse because it could be a maven plugin problem. So I tried maven itself with jdk 1.5 and some minutes later I got other exceptions because Twitter4j source was written with Java 6 syntax (@Override with interface methods).
So I had to use Java 6 with 1.5 target option... After modifying pom.xml of twitter4j-core, the build had another problem: All test cases failed . So I had to use the command-line property -Dmaven.test.skip=true to ignore unit tests.

Finally I got my 1.5 compatible Twitter4j library.

But it was an awful task because maven bundled with Eclipse didn't work as expected. It's horrible if tools that should save time, waste time. I still don't like maven. IMHO it's still to complex compared to other build tools.
A build tool shouldn't be as complex as developing software.

Nowadays everything has to work with our IDEs, but what happens if it doesn't?

I'm a researcher and love solving problems but is it that complex to keep things simple?
Software has to be simple to help us and we - developers - have to write simple software/frameworks/libraries.

Instead of creating simple software, many developers try to write millions LoC. Don't do that because no one can handle such code-bases in the future.

Just sayin'

This new feature is especially for all Oracle Forms developers

It will be possible to configure existing DB storages and create new storages. The feature will be added to the data area of VisionX:

Storage edit button

The new wizard will show the default SQL statement and it'll be possible to change the statement:

Edit DB storage(s)

This new wizard is not useful for end-users because only developers should change SQL statements. Because of that, it won't be available for all VisionX users - it depends on the license.

The new wizard has some additional features like moving a DB storage from screen-level to session level which is like a global storage. You can create DB storages without creating a RemoteDataBook. Such storages will be available as source for drop-downs in the data edit wizard, like Views or Tables.

The new feature-set will make you happy!

We got a lot of (positive) feedback for our live ticker in Packung! It's great to see actual results depending on the current score

We started our live ticker in 2008 with a simple implementation in Java. The solution simply sniffed results from standard html pages. It was easy to get results because result pages didn't use Ajax. It was harder in 2010 and 2012 because Ajax was heavily used. But we found some pages without Ajax.

What's the problem with Ajax? It's not possible to get the complete html content with one simple http request with Java. You need a "browser" that handles javascript and async calls.

We didn't find a html page with live results this year, which didn't use Ajax or Flash. So we thought about a clever solution because we won't pay for "free content". And of course, our betting game is free and we don't earn money. But what's a clever solution? The task is simple: Grab results from existing live-ticker website (be aware of Ajax) - but how?

The solution is simple: Use a browser

But Java doesn't offer a browser control, doesn't it? Yes, JavaFX does!

In 2008 we played around with QT webkit control of QT Jambi (but the project is not active) because it was a nice browser control. The problem was that it didn't work headless and our application server was a linux box without X-Server. This year, we had the same restrictions because our server is a linux box and still no X-Server. We thought that JavaFX could be the right solution for us...

BUT it doesn't work headless enough - not with latest release. It will be better in upcoming releases and/or custom JavaFX builds because there is a Glass windowing component called Monocle. But this was the right challenge for us.

Our current solution runs on Linux, without a real X-Server. It's a JavaFX WebView/WebEngine that reads data from a public live-ticker.

How our solution works?

Install important linux packages:

optional if available

Download and install ATK

and GTK+

Start Xvfb:

Start application:

The application itself is trivial. It's a class with main method:

We need the JFXPanel because JavaFX needs a scene, otherwise it'll throw Exceptions. We don't need the instance for other things.

The SimpleBrowser class is similar to this snippet:

That's it. We got two "silent" Exceptions

after the application start, because of some scrolling problems, but these Exceptions had no effect (in our solution).

The solution would rock with a real headless JavaFX but it's ok for us.

Our VisionX store is now available for selected customers.
It'll be included in VisionX starting with version 2.0.28 and should work out-of-the-box.

The final UI will look like:

VisionX Solution store

We'll offer free applications, modules and addons but also paid content for customers with a valid license. The first application is our Demo ERP which shows the full power of VisionX because it contains reports, a lot of actions, charts, a tree and will run as desktop, web and native iOS application.

The server-side of the store was developed with standard JVx and the client as well, but the client isn't available without VisionX. It's possible to host your own VisionX store in your own environment, but this feature needs a separate license.

Have fun

We re-activated our Twitter storage for Packung! 2014. The old implementation was based on twitter4j 2.1.7 and since Twitter API changes, our implementation stopped to work. After a library update to twitter4j 4.0.1 and some smaller changes, everything is fine again.

The storage in action:

Twitter Storage implementation

The storage extends the standard AbstractMemStorage of JVx.