At the end of the "new features" week, we'll introduce another great VisionX feature. It's the export of an application as desktop application.

What does desktop application mean?

VisionX usually creates 3-tier database applications. The GUI is separated from the business logic and decoupled from the database. The GUI usually runs on client machines, the business logic on application servers and the database could be on the same machine as the application server or could be a different server machine in your network. If you use our HTML5 launcher, the GUI and business logic will run on the application server. This means that the application seams to be 2-tier (Client/Server), but no worries the applications are always 3-tier.

A desktop application should/could work without an application server because it's overhead for some use-cases. This means that the desktop application contains the GUI and the business logic. It directly uses/connects to the database and you could say that such an application is a 2-tier Client/Server application. A desktop application needs manuall "installation" and manual updates. If you have small departments and/or don't have a lot of infrastructure/servers, a desktop application might fit perfectly.

VisionX?

All applications, created with VisionX, have an ant build file that makes it possible to create war files and do deployments. It's an easy task, for developers, to create a desktop application from the created files. It's enough to define the classpath that contains all libraries, use the right main class and add important start parameters. The steps are the same as for any other Java application.

But our applications have some additional features like an application help. This help can be created with VisionX and it's an online help based on vaadin. The integration of an online help into a desktop application makes the task a little bit tricky.

VisionX does all necessary steps for you and your desktop application will be ready after some seconds. The application is packed into a zip archive that contains an executable jar file (start via double click), a bat file for windows, a sh script for linux/mac and an exe file for windows. The installation is very easy because every modern OS is able to extract zip archives without additional tools.