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!

We're happy to announce that JVx 2.7 is available. It's a bigger bugfix release with a small number of new features.

What's new?

• Tibero Database Support
• boolean support

  Our DBAccess implementation now supports boolean as parameter.

• SimpleJavaSource

  It's now possible to create java objects from java source code, see our REST interface

• Struct support

  Struct support for Oracle DB in procedures and functions.

• Session timeouts

  We fixed the problem of session timeouts with long up/downloads.

• WorkScreen

  It's now possible to open a work-screen with additional parameters. A new (optional) Parameter class is available.

• Mac OS

  We fixed the problems with internal frame borders.

• Many improvements

The full changelog is available here.

Start with JVx

If you create an application with VisionX, it's always a JVx based application. You get all advantages of JVx and its GUI independency, but sometimes the GUI indepency is not important and you want to use native GUI controls in your JVx application because JVx doesn't contain the GUI control or you need a commercial control. This is a very simple use-case and it's not a problem to mix JVx components with native components. We have different examples, with different GUI technologies, for this use-case.

Here are some links:

• User defined Components
• JavaFX, JVx, CalendarFX and Exchange Server
• JVx Reference, Custom Components
• JVx Reference, Resource and UIResource

But we don't have a link for our Vaadin implementation. But no problem, here it is!

Simply create a new application with VisionX and a dummy screen like this one:

Simple screen

The screen contains a simple table and two editors. Nothing special. Now we want to add a custom Vaadin component in the empty space. It doesn't matter which component you use. Every vaadin component or AddOn component can be used. JVx doesn't do specific things, it's only an UI abstraction layer.

So, lets add an Accordion to the screen:

Integrated Accordion

The Accordion component is a standard Vaadin component, simply added to the screen. But more... Do you see the "Show Vaadin Notification" Button? This is a standard JVx component. So we mix native vaadin components with standard JVx components and get the full power of both. One advantage of the JVx components is that the automatic translation works without additional hacks, or what about JVx' layouts, event handling, ...

Interested in the source code?

No worries, it's super simple to understand

Lets have a look at the custom code:

The Accordion source code was copied from Vaadin Sampler:

So, what are the most interesting parts in our code?

First, we add the JVx panel to another JVx panel. This is important to get support for translation. If it's not important for your, simply ignore the line:

The groupPanelOverview is a simple UIGroupPanel with UIFormLayout:

Our JVx button will be added to the native vaadin Accordion with following code:

We don't add the JVx component itself, we use the wrapped resource. This is a simple vaadin component: com.vaadin.ui.Button

And finally, we add the Accordion as custom component to our JVx group panel:

This code:

is important for VisionX because the vaadin components aren't available in Swing, so we use this check for the supported environment.

So far, we mixed native vaadin components with JVx components. It's super easy to use, isn't it?

But it's also possible to use CSS for JVx components:

Css style for Button

The button got the friendly style, which is defined in Vaadin CSS. Check some examples.

To add the friendly style class to the JVx button, simple add:

This example is using predefined CSS from vaadin. It's also possible to set custom styles in your own css file. Simple follow this instructions.

This article covered the integration of native vaadin components into an existing JVx application with all advantages of vaadin.

Let's talk about CellEditors, and how they are decoupled from the surrounding GUI.

What are they?

While we've already covered large parts of how the GUI layer and the model of JVx works, the CellEditors have been left completely untouched and unmentioned. One might believe that they can be easily explained together with the Editors, however, they are a topic on their own, and a complex one from time to time that is.

The difference between Editors (the UIEditor for the most part) and CellEditors is that the Editors only provide the high-level GUI control, while the CellEditors provide the actual functionality. Let's take a look at a quite simple screen.

We see a window with a table on the left and some editors on the right, simple enough. Now these components we are seeing are UIEditors, not CellEditors. The CellEditors themselves are only added as child components to the Editors, so the Editors are basically just panels which contain the actual CellEditor.

So technically every UIEditor is just another panel which gets the CellEditor added. The CellEditors themselves follow the same pattern as all GUI components in JVx, there is the base interface, an eventual extension of technology components, the implementation and finally the UI object. They are, however, rarely directly used in building the GUI, but mostly only referenced when building the model.

Why are they?

If you want to make GUI editor components, I know of two possible ways from the top of my head to achieve that: You create dedicated editor components for the datatypes that are available, for example a NumberEditor, TextEditor and so forth. Or you create one editor component which acts as a mere container and allows to plug in any wanted behavior for the type you're editing.

We've opted for the second option, because it means that the GUI is actually decoupled from the datatypes (and in extension the data) of the model. If we'd have separate components for each datatype, changing the datatype of a single column would mean that you'd have to touch all editors associated with that column and change that code, maybe with rippling effects on the rest of the GUI. With the CellEditors, one can change the datatype of a column and not worry about the GUI that is associated with that column. The CellEditor is changed on the model once and that change is automatically picked up by all Editors. Which also means that one can define and change defaults very easily and globally.

Of course one can also set the preferred or wanted CellEditor directly on the Editor, instead of using the one defined in the model, should the need arise.

And the table?

The same applies to the Table. Theoretically, every cell of the Table can be viewed as a single Editor, for this context at least. So a single cell behaves the same as an Editor when it comes to how the CellEditors are handled.

How many are there?

JVx comes with a variety of CellEditors out of the box:

• Boolean
• Choice
• Date/Time
• List
• Number
• Text
• HTML
• Multiline
• Password
• Standard

With these nearly all needs can be covered. If there is need for a new one, it can be created and added like any other UI component.

Using CellEditors

As said previously, which CellEditor is used is defined primarily with the model, for example:

We can see that every column has a datatype and every datatype has a CellEditor. That allows the model to provide the actual editing functionality without changing the GUI code. The Editor, when notifyRepaint() is called, will fetch the CellEditor from the datatype and use it. Additionally, there is a technology dependent default mechanism which allows this system to work even when the UI classes are not used.

Let's do a step by step explanation of what happens:

1. The model is created.
2. The GUI is created.
3. The model invokes notifyRepaint() on all bound controls.
4. The Editor gets the CellEditor from the model and adds it to itself.

One moment, instance sharing?

If we revisit at the example code from above, we will notice that the CellEditor instance is set on the model and must then be used by the Editor. That means that a single CellEditor instance is used for all bound Editors. We all know that sharing instances in such a way can be fun, but in this case it is not a problem because CellEditors are only "factories" for the actual editing components.

The ICellEditor interface does actually only specify two methods, whether it is a direct cell editor, and the factory method for creating an ICellEditorHandler. The CellEditorHandler is the manager of the instance of the component that is going to be embedded into the Editor.

1. notifyRepaint() is called on the editor.
2. The Editor gets the CellEditorHandler from the CellEditor.
3. The Editor gets the component from the CellEditorHandler and embeds it.

This mechanism makes sure that no component instances end up shared between different GUI components.

A closer look at the CellEditorHandler

If we take a good look at the CellEditorHandler interface, we see that it contains everything that is required for setting up a component to be able to edit data coming from a DataRow. One method is especially important, the getCellEditorComponent() function. It returns the actual technology component that is to be embedded into the Editor. That means that even though there are implementations for the CellEditors on the UI layer, the actual components which will provide the functionality for editing the data are implemented on the technology layer. A short refresher:

Revisiting our simple screen from above, we'd actually need to represent it as something like this:

Because the embedded components in the Editor are actually on the technology layer.

CellRenderers

There is another small topic we need to discuss, CellRenderers. They follow nearly the same schematics as CellEditors but are used to display values directly, for example values in a table cell. The Table is also the primary component which uses them to display the cell values until the editing is started. For simplicity reasons, most CellEditors implement ICellRenderer directly and provide management of the created component. That is because the reuse of components for barely displaying values is easier does not contain as much error potential.

Conclusion

CellEditors provide an easy mechanic to allow to edit data, and more important, they are decoupled from the GUI code in which they are used in a way which allows the model to change, even dynamically. That enables programmers to create and edit screens and models quickly without the need to check if the GUI and the model fit together, they always do.

Let's do a small experiment, and see if we can reduce the code required in screens and lifecycle objects to a minimum.

But be advised, this blog post is meant as a food for thoughts and less as a practical manual on doing things. So we will explore different possibilities which might not be practical.

Starting point

We will start with a small screen which has been automatically generated by VisionX, but has (manually) been stripped of all comments, documentation, imports and has some formatting modifications to make it easier readable in this post.

This is the PeopleWorkScreen class. It really doesn't do much except containing a Split panel, having on the left a table and on the right a few editors. That does look quite manageable, also it does look as one would expect in the GUI.

But it is a very good starting point for our experiments. As an additional note, we will lose VisionX support with all the changes we will make, unfortunately, that can't be circumvented I'm afraid.

Annotations for editors

The first thought one has when it comes to reducing code is to use Annotations to deliver important information. We can do this here, too, to remove some setup from the editors and instead add it to a more central place. So we will create a new Annotation which is holding the required information for the editors, which are the name of the databook and the name of the column.

As one can see, we've annotated the fields with our new Annotation and removed the setup lines from the initializeUI() function. Of course, that alone does nothing, we must add the processing of the annotations somewhere. The best place would be in the application when the workscreen is opened.

Easy enough, it removes some lines from the screen and the logic added inside the application is straightforward.

The upside is that we now have the information of the data binding right there in the field declaration, the downside is that it doesn't save us that much. In theory the gain is only 1 line per editor. We could do better than that.

Automatic editors

Annotations are interesting, but don't fit well here. We could do better when we extend the UIEditor itself and fit it with the necessary logic to be able to find its data binding on its own. That means that it would need to go upward at some point and find its parent workscreen to retrieve the datasource (which holds all the databooks). Walking upwards in the hierarchy is straightforward, the question is when we should do that? The best point in time would be when addNotify() is being called, because at that point the GUI is being created, so we are very, very likely inside the initializeUI() function of the workscreen or at a later point.

That removes the complete setup of the editor from the code, with the exception of the constructor, and instead the editor itself manages its own setup, neat. So I think we can't lose any more of the editor associated code at this point, the only further possibility would be to associate a "default" databook with the workscreen so that we can scrap the databook name from the constructor. Or, we could scan the fields of the screen and build the editors based on their name, but that is a rather fragile approach.

Inline fields

While we are at it and we will lose VisionX support anyway, we can inline the fields directly into the initializeUI() function to shed more lines.

That makes the code harder to read but in the end it saves a lot of lines.

Automatic databooks

Now the only part of the screen which we can now reduce is the model part. This is a little more complicated, though. First, if we create a databook on the fly it's a little bit more complicated to get it customized, so we have to assume that we can use the databooks "as they are", with all the necessary setup being done on the server side (which is ideal anyway). Second, ideally we could let the connection create the databooks as they are needed, that is a little bit more complicated and for this example we will add that logic to the screen instead. So the PeopleWorkScreen gains the method getDataBook(String) which gets or creates a databook for the given name and returns it.

and the changed editor

This introduces a quite unhealthy coupling between the PeopleWorkScreen and the AutomaticEditor, we can live with that for this example, but in a real application we'd have to correctly structure these objects. For example by introducing a workscreen base class, or by actually extending the datasource to provide this functionality.

If we ingore the method we just introduced in the PeopleWorkScreen, we actually managed to reduce the screen class a great deal and removed code which can be automated. That means that, at least theoretically, the likelihood of errors as we write the code has been lowered and it has become easier to write error free code. We can also now see that the screen class has become quite minimal, there really isn't anything left that we could restructure or remove.

Lifecycle objects

Now let us jump to the server and have a look at the associated lifecycle object.

There isn't much here that we can do, but a few small things might make it easier to write in the future. Again, we will be losing VisionX support if we edit this "too much", but we are far beyond that point anyway.

Reducing error potential

What can happen easily with managing storages is that one does copy and paste code and misses to edit the key, under which the storage is stored, correctly. That can happen quickly especially if there is a complex object hierarchy in place. So what we can do is separating the storing logic from the creation logic.

This has the upside that it would reduce the error potential greatly, especially with a lot of storages, and it would allow us to add additional safety checks, for example if a storage with that name is already existing and would be overridden. But it has the downside that with each access a new lambda function is created, that might or might not be important for your use case.

If we try to mitigate this side effect we will quickly reach certain limits, for example if we change the process to a registry based approach we will find that we've again introduced the very thing we wanted to remove. The storage configurer must be registered at the registry with a name and the storage must be received with a name, so we'd be back at square one, actually.

A more dynamic approach

To get rid of this duplication of the name we could create a registry with the configurers and use a generic approach to retrieving it. The problem here is that that is not possible at compile time, so what we need would actually be a system that catches non-matched calls for storages in the client/server connection and redirects it to our generic method. That is unfortunately not trivial and I will only outline this approach here now.

Now all that is missing would be that the connection is calling our getOrCreateStorage(String) method with the name of the requested object. Of course there is also a lot of error checking missing here, but that is not relevant for our example.

And again, if we remove the additional code we added, because it should be contained inside a base class, we have managed to reduce the code on the server side significantly. From here going any further becomes complicated, for example, again, one might to work with Annotations but that won't save us anything here anymore.

Conclusion

From time to time it is necessary to let the thoughts drift and think about different things, for example how to reduce the code inside of classes which are automatically generated and managed. Once I had a nice discussion with someone online on how to do things differently in their library. We had a little back and forth on what could be done and in the end we agreed that it should stay the way it was because none of the approaches we came up with had a significant advantage over the current state. In the end they said that, even though nothing came of it, it was an important discussion to have because from time to time one had to engage in such stimulated, technical and theoretical discussions, and I agree completely with that. It is important to be open to new ideas and consider different approaches even when they don't end up taken.

Let's talk about the FormLayout, and why the anchor system makes it much more flexible than just a simple grid.

Basics

JVx comes with 5 layouts by default:

• null/none/manual
• BorderLayout
• FlowLayout
• GridLayout
• FormLayout

From these five the first four are easily explained, only the FormLayout needs some more information because it might not be as easy to grasp in the first moment than the others.

The FormLayout uses a dependent anchor system. An Anchor in this context is a position inside the layout which is calculated from parent anchors and either the size of the component or a fixed value. So we can say there are two different types of Anchors inside the FormLayout which we are concerned about:

• AutoSize-Anchors, its position is calculated from the component assigned to it.
• Fixed-Anchors, its position is fixed.

Additionally, there are three special cases of Fixed-Anchors:

• Border-Anchors, which surround the FormLayout at its border.
• Margin-Anchors, which are inset from the border by the defined value.
• Gap-Anchors, which are added to create a gap between components.

When it comes to calculating the position of an anchor, the position of the parent anchor is determined and then the value of the current anchor is added (which is either the size of a component or a fixed value). Simplified and in pseudo-code it can expressed like this:

With this knowledge, we are nearly done with completely understanding the FormLayout.

Creating constraints

Now, the second important part after the basics is knowing how the constraints are created. For example this:

With the coordinates of 0,0, no new anchors are created but instead the component is attached to the top and left margin anchor. Two new AutoSize-Anchors (horizontally and vertically) are created and attached to the component.

If we now add a second component in the same row:

Because we are still on row 0 the component is attached to the top margin anchor and the previous AutoSize-Anchor for this row. Then, a new Gap-Anchor will be created which is attached to the trailing AutoSize-Anchor of the previous component.

We can of course also add items to the right and bottom:

What happens is the same as when adding a component at the coordinates 0,0, except that the reference is the lower right corner. The component is attached to the bottom and right margin anchors, with trialing AutoSize-Anchors.

Last but not least, we can add components which span between anchors:

Again, the same logic applies as previously, with the notable exception that new Gap-Anchors are created for all four sides. That includes variants which span over anchors:

The component is horizontally attached to the left Margin-Anchor and additionally to the AutoSize-Anchor of the second column. The AutoSize- and Gap-Anchor of the first column are not ignored, they are not relevant to this case.

At this point it is important to note that spanning and stretched components are disregarded for the preferred size calculation of the layout. So whenever you span or stretch a component, it is not taken into account when the preferred size of the layout is calculated, which can lead to unexpected results.

Interactive demo

Sometimes, however, it might not be obvious what anchors are created and how they are used. For this we have created a simple interactive demonstration application which allows to inspect the created anchors of a layout, the JVx FormLayout Visualization.

On the left is the possibility to show and hide anchors together with the information about the currently highlighted anchor. On the right is a Lua scripting area which allows you to quickly and easily rebuild and test layouts. It utilizes the JVx-Lua bridge from a previous blog post and so any changes to the code are directly applied.

The most simple usage: Flow-like

Enough of the internals, let's talk use-cases. The most simple use-case for the FormLayout can be a container which flows its contents in a line until a certain number of items is reach, at which it breaks into a new line:

It does not require any interaction from us except adding components. In this case, when three components have been added, the next one will be added to the next line and so on. This is quite useful when all you want to do is display components in a fixed horizontal grid.

The obvious usage: Grid-like

The FormLayout can also be used to align components in a grid, and actually layout them in a grid-like fashion:

With the main difference being that the columns and rows are sized according to the components in it and not given a fixed slice of the width of the panel.

The advanced usage: Anchor Configuration

Additionally, the FormLayout offers the possibility to manually set the anchor positions, for example when it is necessary to give the first elements a certain size:

Together with the ability to span components, this allows to create complex and rich layouts.

Conclusion

The JVx FormLayout allows to quickly and easily create complex, good looking and working layouts which are still flexible enough for the cases when a component is swapped, removed or added. It can be used in many different circumstances and is still easy enough to use to make sure that even beginners are able to create a basic layout within seconds.

Our generic REST interface of JVx got an update.

The REST services are a powerful feature of JVx and built-in. Usually you would implement your own REST services, but JVx has the concept of lifecycle objects and the powerful action mechanism. It would be ugly to implement another layer on top of JVx just for REST services. This is a framework feature.

We had this powerful feature for a long time and it is still in use for different use-cases:

AngularJS 4 with VisionX and JVx REST services
AngularJS with JVx in action

Our REST interface just works and you are able to create microservices very fast and efficient.

But the interface has a problem with some kind of parameters because they are also generic. Suppose you have the following method:

The result type (IFileHandle) isn't a problem because JVx will send the bytes in the REST response, but the parameters: pFilter and pSort are specific types and not base types like String, Array, int, float.

It wasn't possible to call such methods without wrapper methods like:

Still not hard to solve, but parsing the filter and sort definition weren't trivial tasks. In fact, it was annoying.

We now have support for such parameters and much more. It's not super modern but an awesome solution!

Assume you have following code in one of your lifecycle objects:

The DBStorage class offers a public method:

This method creates a CSV report (address data in this example). It has some parameters for the expected filename, optional column names which should be used for the report, optional labels for the column names, the filter condition and sort definition.

To call this method as REST service, simply send a post request with following information:

e.g. URL:

(demo is the application name, Address is the lifecycle object name, adrData is the object name)

Body:

The body contains Java Code (in the JSON string).

W00t?

JVx got support for executing simple Java code. We introduced the new utility class SimpleJavaSource. It's a backport from our commercial product VisionX. The SimpleJavaSource is able to execute the given parameters and creates real Java objects. It doesn't support conditions or loops, so it's really simple - but powerful!

With our new SimpleJavaSource and the support for parameter Code, it'll be possible to call most methods without additional wrapper methods.

The SimpleJavaSource class is now included in JVx and ready to use. It's simple but powerful:

The new features will be available with our next JVx release and are already available via nightly builds.