It's done. We proudly present an awesome VisionX release. It has the version number 2.1.905 and has doubled its features.

Here are some of them:

• Undo & Redo

  It's now possible to Undo and Redo Actions and Reports. Simply add an action to a button undo the creation if you want. The action will be removed from the screen. It's also possible to add the action again, via redo.

  In VisionX 2.0, only UI elements could be deleted but not actions or reports.

• Eclipse integration

  It's a developer feature and allows bidirectional communication between Eclipse IDE and VisionX. Simply select an editor in VisionX and the source code in Eclipse will be selected. The integration allows faster development because you jump exactly to the source file and code line of your screen. Don't was time for searching properties and files. More...

• Layout Assistant
  

  The Layout assistant (designer) of VisionX 2.0 was column oriented and it wasn't possible to create free-form layouts without fixed positioning. The new layout assistant still is column oriented but you can use it free-form. You have all features of a layout manager (preferred size, automatic size calculation) but it's easy to create individual layouts which are not column oriented.

• ActionEditor

  It's a small feature, but the action editor now allows Finish without explicite validating the action. It save so many unnecessary klicks.

• PDF Reporting

  We have built-in support for toPDF in VisionX. With VisionX it's possible to create PDF reports as Document and Spreadsheet with Word and Excel. Create your report templates with Word or Excel and create PDF reports out-of-the-box. More...

• Mobile and Web
  

  VisionX got wizards for mobile und web settings. They allow styling of web and mobile applications like background color, background images, ... Simply define which image should be used in web or mobile applications instead of the original image, e.g. the mobile application should use flat images but the desktop shouldn't.

• Developer features

  It's now possible to set the name/ID of components. This feature is a developer feature and useful for automated GUI tests or styling via CSS. More...

• License options

  We offer subscription based VisionX usage. You can use and pay on a monthly base. We don't offer SaaS. VisionX will run in your environment.

  Also new is the support for SAP' Hana. If you work with Hana, you could use VisionX to create Hana based applications.

• Popup menu

  It's very easy to create custom popup menus for a component. Simply use the new customizer and define the action.
  More...

• Manual dropdown-list configuration

  We allow the creation of custom dropdown lists directly with VisionX. Create your own statements or storages and use the data wizard to configure the editors. More...

• Solution store

  The solution store offers ready-made solutions. We offer free and demo applications for learning purposes and also commercial solutions. The solution store is also available for your environment. You can install the store for your intranet, if you need a distribution platform your your applications, addons or modules. More...

• Responsive application

  Your new web applications will be responsive - out of the box. The styling of the application will be changed dependent of the browser size. We have an API for software developers to create responsive work screens. More...

• Desktop application

  Create a desktop application per click. Use VisionX to create a desktop application package.

• Other features

  Repeating frames
  QR Codes

Our customers should check their download area to get access to the new release.

The last official JVx release was in May and last VisionX version was released in July. We think it's time to update both and planned the release of JVx 2.1 and VisionX 2.1 for the end of November. Currently, we are in time and shouldn't have any delays.

There are some open tickets for JVx and VisionX, but the planned features are done. The open tickets are nice to have and favoured from the 2.2' release.

Especially VisionX 2.1 will be an awesome new release because it contains soo many new features. The new solution store, the styling of mobile and web applications, the new GUI designer, PDF reporting, IDE integration, subscription based licensing and many more. The release will be the first with full Oracle Forms migration support. It has all known features of Oracle Forms like Repeating Frames, Focus order, Popup Menu configuration.

The release will contain solutions for over 200 tickets.

And what's in JVx 2.1?

We've some cool changes, e.g. great support for automatic tests (unique component names), reduced metadata caching, JNDI support for configuration files, Replacement and StrictIsolation annotations, REST refactoring and many more.

Stay tuned

The upcoming release of VisionX will support PDF report creation. We didn't re-invent the wheel and used our existing reporting engine with our templating mechanism. You'll simply create a word or excel template as usual and the result will be a PDF file.

The new PDF options

PDF reports

Our solution is based on toPDF and we recommend the commercial SDK, but it's also possible to integrate an OpenSource alternative or your own product. We'll help you if you need support!

We think that an end-user should create reports with word and excel instead of custom reporting tools. Of course, a developer will love it
Don't waste time anymore!.

The big advantage of our solution is that the reports will look exactly as designed and you won't use new tools to create pixel perfect reports.

We have a nice looking Reporting application in our solution store. It's a standard JVx application with a styled table.

But it's not a table demo! It demonstrates report creation for offline data manipulation. Simply create Excel sheets for your contacts, change the contact offline and update the online record with a simple upload. The Excel file has choice fields and allows same features as the online form.

Here it is

Reporting demo

of course, it's free

Simply open the solution store and install the application

A new demo application is available for VisionX.
It's a very simple application that demonstrates the user and role capabilities of VisionX.

Ready made solution

The application has two screens: Overview and Project types.

The overview screen has three buttons:

Overview screen

The buttons Report and Details are not enabled for users with role Read. The Add button near type field only is visible for users with Manage role. If a user has Read role, the window title will contain (readonly). The assigned user roles will be shown beside the project name.

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.

The next great feature of JVx is the customizable focus order.

The focus order defines the navigation between components via Tabulator or Enter. If you press Tab in an Editor with index 1, the focus will jump to the component (e.g. an Editor) with the next higher index. If you didn't define an index, the default focus order of Java will be used.

We introduced

in IComponent. This makes it possible to easily configure the focus order. We also have support for this new feature in VisionX. It's really helpful:

Set focus order

The designer shows the focus index and it's possible to set the index via customizer.

All our applications have a menu and a toolbar. This is great for backend applications but not always good for web frontends. Our web UIs have a different menubar, styled for web, but it's always visible. If you have simple web forms, you won't use a menu. We did some changes and have new options for applications without menu and toolbar

Some impressions with standard (backend) Desktop application and as (frontend) web application:

Backend application

Frontend application

It's very simple to hide the menu. Simply set an application property via application.xml or directly via launcher - that's it. We changed our web menu and allow access to internal panels and components. It will be possible to hide buttons, change layouts, etc.

It's still possible to create your own, custom, application frame or extend our pre-defined frame. The new feature will be available in the next VisionX update.

We have another useful VisionX feature for you in the queue. It's the support for popup menus. It'll be possible to create and use popup menus for UI components. We had to change JVx to support this feature. It's now easily possible to work with popups because UIComponent got a new method: setPopupMenu(IPopupMenu).

The feature will be easy to use for end-users because it's not rocket science and we re-used existing VisionX concepts. Here's a first screenshot:

Popup menu integration