It took some time, but now our application is available.

We did not change the original source code, so the installation contains our result after ~ 25 hours of work. The application is available as WebUI (html/ajax) application and as RIA (Applet). I think we were the only team with "two" frontends.

But after some good news we have a package with bad news: Most of our REST services do not work because we damaged the whole interface during our last deployment, so we are not happy with that. And last but not least, our start html for the RIA stuff is not correct. Time pressure is a killer

Where were the problems?

It was not an enormous amount of time available, but it was absolutely possible to implement all MUSTs and most SHOULDs of the specification. For the MAYs it was not enough time.

Our biggest problem was the REST integration, because we did not have any support in JVx. We decided to implement a generic REST interface based on RESTlet. We knew that the decision is a high risk because it is easier to implement the REST service without regard to JVx. But we wanted to use the result as part of the framework. We were doing well but some problems with the authentication took more time as calculated and so we had big problems towards the end. We knew that the REST services are very important for the analysis phase by the jury, but it was not possible to fix all problems before the packaging phase. And it was better to deliver our work instead of fixing and not to deliver.
In summary: missing framework support and not enough experience with REST.

The frontend/database parts were straight forward, because JVx has powerful features. We developed with our Swing UI implementation and after we finished a task, we have tested with our Web UI implementation. Of course the Web UI had some limits and smaller problems, but we changed some smaller parts to meet the requirements.
In summary: worked great.

The look and feel of the result was not important, either for us nor for the specification, and we did not check the usability. It was important for us that we have a quick access to all controls. And of course, we normally don't create web portals with JVx. It was designed to develop business (database) applications, but we had surprisingly few problems.

What about unit tests and code quality?

Most tests were manual tests because we did not have a lot of complex workflows and we had not enough time for TDD. Of course, we used JUnit for the REST services and for iCalendar creation, but thats all (best not to start EMMA because our test coverage is holey). On the other side, we produced a perfect source code documentation because our checkstyle config did not tolerate any mistakes.
In summary: With the quality we are satisfied.

Team organization?

Martin handled the whole database stuff, most of the User Interface and all workflows
Roland was in a REST "loop"
René took the rest of the User Interface, Business logic, managed the Team, Deployment, Testing and WebUI fixes

We had no problems to work together, it is always easy if you know each other.

Resume

The result could have been better, but even worse - we have our lessons learned.
We had a lot of fun, a perfect organization team and two days of pure adrenalin paired with motivation.

Some days ago, we updated our showcase application and especially the WebUI implementation.
But what is new?

Our WebUI has some great new features, in addition to our Plat_Forms release.

Check out the Help menu - the help is now embedded in the application. Another great feature is the download option for grids - press the small export button beside the grids. Or try uploading an image in the contacts screen - works great

Smaller changes are grid specific, e.g. the sort operation is now a remote operation, same for inserting new lines.

We welcome your feedback!

Our showcase application was updated with the latest versions of JVx and WebUI. It demonstrates the new simple charting, global meta data caching and a lot of new features of WebUI, like Upload or Help integration.

The Plat_Forms contest 2011 is over. We are proud to have participated.

Working together was really fun:

collaboration

The task (Conferences and Participants) was very interesting and we tried to use our JVx WebUI for the implementation (somewhat riskily, but an interesting challenge).

The user interface was not a real problem, of course the WebUI needs some additional features, but it is ok. On the other side, we had problems with the REST service implementation because we tried to solve it very dynamic, to be reusable for JVx.
But there was not enough time to finish the implementation. And last but not least, we damaged the REST authentication during the last possible deployment. That means that our REST service does not work - very frustrating... but we had a lot of fun.

We know that our solution has some problems, but the usage of the framework during the whole contest was really fun. And we used our single sourcing mechanism for development: We developed with our Swing Launcher and deployed the app as Ajax/HTML application - it worked great.

We give a first insight into our result (the design did not matter):

SIB Visions - Plat_Forms 2011

The Web interface is competitive, even if it was not designed for the creation of content management systems:) For classical web development, we need a different application style, but that has nothing to do with the technology behind.

Now we look forward to the results of the Jury.

We talked with James Sugrue from Javalobby (dzone) about JVx. He had some questions about the framework and we talked with him about the next features.

Read the full interview.

Because of the Plat_Forms competition, we released special versions of JVx, WebUI and OnlineHelp. All releases are available from our project page.

We implemented some amazing new features for JVx and WebUI.

Check out the changelogs for details.

Some tags:

• Simple charting
• Default layouts
• Global metadata caching (server-side)
• Modal frames in WebUI
• Table handling in WebUI

The next beta version is planned for Friday, 7th January 2010. It contains some important bugfixes and improvements for DB handling. The default server implementation supports a custom session manager and object provider. And of course we solved some problems of the previous beta.

We described all DataBook events and row states with some articles in our Forum. The events and states are very important if you need special data/row handling on client side e.g. ask the user before delete record(s).

The articles includes flow charts and practical examples. If anyone has questions, just post to the forum.

Direct links to the events and states.

We have a lot of useful features in JVx. It is very easy to develop multi tier applications, two tier applications or simple desktop applications - started as RIA, Web or Standalone application.
Every tier is technology independent and does not require third party frameworks. We can use every useful framework to create business logic.

But we don't have a lot of connectors out-of-the box (at the moment). There are a lot of technologies out there, e.g. NOSQL, Cloud services, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, REST, ...

Not all technologies are useful for business apllications, but it is a lot of fun to work with new technologies

We spent some hours to develop a simple Twitter client (rather a connector) to read/delete/insert Tweets. The result can be seen here:

Twitter client with JVx

What we did?

• Created a new Storage, called TwitterStorage
• extended AbstractMemStorage
• Implemented loadData, insert, delete and getRowDefinition
• used twitter4j

After 290 lines of code we were finished. The standard RemoteDataBook works perfect with the new Storage (full support for filtering, sorting, master-detail relations).

The last release of JVx - 0.8 - was published on 11th October. But when is the release date of JVx 0.9 and later?

We defined following release cycles for the upcoming versions:

• GA release cycles of 6 months.
• We don't publish alpha versions/nightly builds.
• Beta versions every month (no fixed intervals). The first beta version of the next release will be available 1 month after the last GA release.
• Developer builds are possible with the source code from our repository (ant build files are included).

For the JVX Release 0.9, this means:

• Next Beta: first week of December (No Beta version for November)
• Next GA release in March/April 2011

This is our current schedule.
We are open for discussions to optimize our approach.