We have some great Videos for new VisionX users on our YouTube channel.

Here are the links:

Getting started
How to create your first application
How to use Eclipse & VisionX in real time

Check them out!

These Videos will help new users learning VisionX

I'm happy to announce that our Workflow Engine will work with Oracle Forms.

The current state is beta but we'll release our Workflow engine in the next days. We found some time to test the integration in Oracle Forms and the result is soo cool. It works like a charm.

So it will be possible to embed our Workflow engine in your oracle Forms. It'll be possible for your users to design custom flows and processes. The engine itself is database driven and will work with your Oracle Forms application.

More details will follow in the next days, but here's a first impression:

Workflow Engine - Oracle Forms

It's a standard Oracle Forms window/canvas with our Workflow Designer, embedded as Java Bean.

Feel free to ask your questions

We improved the support for standard MacOS LaF in our Swing UI and VisionX. The LaF has a lot of rendering problems. We tried to use another LaF implementation but had other problems. So we decided to keep the standard Java MacOS LaF.

The problems

• The InternalFrame border problem
• The field border problem
  

  Field border problem

  A simple JTextField has a 5 pixel focus border. This is horrible because the focus is about 2 pixel. The other problem is that a JTextArea wrapped in a JScrollPane doesn't have the 5 pixel border. This makes it hard to create nice looking layouts.

  We fixed this problem:

  Field border without gap

  Looks better. One problem is that the JScrollPane doesn't paint the focus if the JTextArea has the focus. This is a LaF problem and we didn't find a workaround for this problem.

• Application Menubar

  Standard Java appliacations show the menubar in the same frame

  Application menu

  If you set the system property:

  System.setProperty("apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar", "true");

the menu will be placed in the menu bar of MacOS:

macOS Menu

We fixed the problem that setting the menu to null will keep the menu as it was.

• Comboboxes

  The height of Standard Comboboxes is wrong:

  Combobox wrong

  We fixed the problem as good as possible:

  Combobox fixed

• VisionX Toolbar height

  The toolbar height was wrong because of layout calculation problems:

  Wrong Toolbar height

  We fixed the problem and the toolbar height is correct:

  Toolbar fixed

• VisionX Wizard gaps

  The image gaps in VisionX wizards was not recognized:

  Wrong gaps

  It looks better without gaps:

  No gaps

• Wrong button rendering

  If you had a button without an image and a button with an image, the height of the button without image was higher than the button with an image. This is a LaF rendering bug:

  Wrong size and font

  The fonts are also different. We didn't know why there has to be such a difference, but we fixed the problem in Swing UI:

  Button with correct size and font

All changes are available in our nightly JVx builds

This article is a short introduction of our brand-new product. It's a super simple workflow engine. Our workflow engine is database driven and can be configured and extended for your needs. The engine itself contains a simple board which allows you to create workflows. The configuration will be read from and saved into a database. The workflow steps are configured in the database and the engine simply executes the configured steps.

We tried to find a workflow solution for our needs or a simple product which supports drawing workflows. We found a lot of complex workflow engines and tools but not a simple one. We didn't like complex solutions so we started with our own workflow enigne.

And here are some impressions

Workflow Designer (loop)

Workflow Designer

The left area contains the list of available workflows and all used steps for each workflow. The search option is a full-text search for workflows and contained steps.

The right area contains all available/configured steps. The steps are configured in a database. We offer a simple Java interface which makes it possible to implement your own workflow steps. The area also contains a mini version of the board. This makes it smooth to search through the workflow.

The middle area, the board, contains the workflow designer. It supports Drag and Drop.

The created workflows can be used from any JVx based application. With next VisionX release, it'll be possible to use the new workflow engine.

The workflow engine will be available as AddOn for VisionX and as standalone version for product bundeling.

VisionX 5 is available It's an awesome version with so many new features and new possibilities. We had some hard months but now it's done and it's available for everyone. We made the decision to wait a little bit longer with VisionX 5 because of changes in used frameworks.

The new Version is more web centric than any version before, but it's not a web tool. VisionX 5 still supports Desktop application creation.

So what's new?

• Default Stylesheet

  All new applications will contain an empty application.css. This file could be used to add custom HTLM5 application styles.

• New CSS Editor (Web settings)

  The new CSS editor makes it possible to change the style of the application directly within VisionX. The Editor supports Search/Replace/Goto line. It's also supported to reload the application in the browser. Simply test your style changes immediately.

  

  CSS Editor

  It supports syntax highlighting and auto completion. Read more...

• New default Theme for HTML5

  Newly created applications will use the new default theme "valo" as standard theme. It's possible to change the theme in web settings wizard.

• Additional Themes

  VisionX 5 is shipped with following themes: Standard, Valo, Valo (small), Mobile

• Navigation

  The page navigation is now enabled by default. It support Back/Forward Browser navigation for the application.

• New Tabset navigation

  It's also possible to enable tabset navigation. This feature enables Back/Forward navigation for tab sheets. This feature is disabled by default. It can be found in the web settings.

• Favicon

  It wasn't easy to change the favicon for your application because it is stored in different locations. VisionX 5 solves this problem because it's possible to change the favicon directly in VisionX.

  

  Favicon support

  It's also possible to use the favicon as icon for desktop applications. VisionX will extract the image directly from the favicon.

• New GUI element: Menu Button

  The Menu Button is a simple button which shows a popup menu if you click the button. The component itself also supports a default action, but this is a new feature of JVx' UIPopupMenuButton. The component is available in the elements area.

  

  Menu Button

• New Web Elements

  The web elements is a new element area. The elements are preconfigured components like an Insert Button. This Button simply inserts a new record in a table. This web elements will work for desktop applications as well, but are often used in web applications.

  

  Web Elements

• New web element: Table Menu Button

  The Table Menu Button is a Menu Button with preconfigured menu items like Delete, Export. It's also possible to add custom menu items via menu customizer.

  

  Table Menu Button Items

• Menubar Image

  It's now possible to configure the web menus independent of the desktop menu. Every screen has a menu icon and a toolbar icon. The menu icon will be used for the menubar and the toolbar icon for the toolbar in Desktop applications.

  The HTML5 application has different layout modes. The standard, the corporation and the legacy mode. The standard mode shows the menu in a sidebar on the left or right of the browser frame. This sidebar was used as toolbar in versions before VisionX 5. If you did configure a toolbar image, the screen was shown as image in the toolbar of your Desktop application and in the sidebar of your HTML5 application. It wasn't possible to configure an image, only, for the HTML5 sidebar. This feature is now available in the menu settings wizard.

  

  Web Menubar

  The toolbar image will be used for the toolbar in the corporation mode, as usual.

• New Edit Panel Customizer

  The Edit Panel now supports a Navigation mode: Single click, Double click and No navigation.

  

  Customizer

  It's also possible to morp an Edit Panel into a Tabset, a simple Panel or a Group Panel.

• All/No columns

  It's now possible to show/hide all columns of a table via customizer. It wasn't nice to click through e.g. 50 columns. Now it's easy to show only 2 columns of e.g. 50 columns.

  

  Show/Hide all

• Default image mapping for HTML5

  It was possible to map desktop images for e.g. HTML5. It's better to use simple/flat images in web applications compared to desktop applications. The web style should be or is different to standard desktops.

  With VisionX 5, we did the default mapping for you and a standard web application will show different standard images.

  

  Image mapping

  Same application, no changes necessary. Only some image mappings!

• FontAwesome support

  JVx has FontAwesome support for a while, but this feature wasn't integrated in VisionX. The new image chooser supports FontAwesome.

  

  FontAwesome

• Custom image libraries

  It's now supported to extend VisionX with custom image libraries. We have different commercial AddOns in our Solution store.

  

  Image library AddOns

The libraries will extend the image chooser.



Extended Image chooser

It's also possible to integrate your own offline image libraries.

• New tutorials

  We have new tutorials and new Tutorial Applications in our Store.

• New Edit Panel features

  The integrated edit panel has new features like Tab Navigation by Buttons. The edit dialog now has OK and Cancel. It supports single our double click navigation.

• Server actions and DB functions

  Our action editor now supports (Oracle) database function calls and server-side function calls.

  

  Server Actions

• Better Action Code Editor

  The source code editor now supports syntax highlighting and code folding.

  

  Action Code Editor

• New Button options

  It's now possible to change the button border behaviour.

  

  Button options

• New Search Options

  The search field now supports Contains and Starts with.

  

  Search options

• Better HTML5 default styling

  We improved the Split Panels and fixed some problems with focus.

  

  HTML5 Styling

  The split handle is now small.

• Vaadin 8

  Our HTML5 GUI is now based on Vaadin 8.1 instead of Vaadin 7. With Vaadin 8, the UI is faster and supports all modern AddOns from the Vaadin Directory.

  We offer a Vaadin AddOn for VisionX to integrate AddOns from the directory.

• New HTML5 layouting mechanism

  We rewrote the layout mechanism of our HTML5 UI because our Form Layout didn't support all available features. Now it's possible to overlap elements or to work with Anchors directly. The new layout mechanism can be disabled if necessary. In this case, the old mechanism will be used.

• Documentation

  The online documentation is now available.

  

  Documentation

• Library updates

  JVx changes, VaadinUI changes

VisionX 5 still contains Applet and Webstart support, but with VisionX 6 we will remove Applet support because the technology is EOL.

The new Version of VisionX will require a new license. Simply ask your sales contact to get a new one. The download area already contains links to VisionX 5 binaries.

Please report any problems as usual and have fun with VisionX 5.

We showed you the upcoming CSS edit feature of VisionX. This feature was used in our new tutorial Style Invoice application.

The standard Invoice application was more or less a standard VisionX application with some standard colors and icons. Not super fancy.

The Styled Invoice application demonstrates how easy it can be to apply your own Style to an application, created with VisionX.

The new tutorial is available in our documentation system.

The standard application:

Standard Invoice application

The styled application:

Styled Invoice application

The upcoming release of VisionX will support CSS styling. We'll show you a first impression with a short video:

The editor supports autocompletion and syntax highlighting:

VisionX CSS Editor

We did integrat the RSyntaxTextArea for this. If you want to know how this works, check the documentation.

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!

We're happy to announce VisionX 2.4 Update Release 2. It's another milestone for us.

The new version is a bugfix release with some important features for all our customers. The top bug was a missing license check for our HTML5 implementation. With older versions it was possible to use our HTML5 application without valid license. This wasn't a hidden feature, it was a real bug. The new version has a clean license check and some of you will need a new license. This is no problem, simply contact us.

What's new?

• Full-Screen mode

  Press F12 to maximize VisionX without frame border.

• HTML5 Live preview options

  It supports "application per session", custom UI factory, custom Application setups, main, config and externalCss URL parameter.

• VisionX is now http session ready

  It will be possible to use VisionX on server-side as backend for remote application development.

• Fixed Copy/Paste for DnD fields

  It's now possible to Copy/Paste into field with DnD support.

• Automatic UI tests

  VisionX now supports automatic UI tests with an optional AddOn. The mechanism isn't limited to our AddOn. It's also possible to create custom Modules/AddOns.

• Tibero Database support

  VisionX has built-in support for Tibero Database (tested with version 6).

• Auto-restart feature

  VisionX got a Preloader. This allows custom libraries without manually changing the classpath. The old classpath mechanism is still available, but we use the Preloader by default.

• Action Editor with custom editor support

  It's now possible to add custom editors in the action editor via action.xml and/or a custom module.

• GridLayout support

  It's now possible to use panels with GridLayout, if set in Source Code.

• Custom vaadin widgetsets and themes

  It's now possible to create custom vaadin widgetsets, e.g. add an AddOn from the Vaadin Directory. It's super easy to create a custom theme and setting your custom css attributes.

• Performance improvement

  We reduced the fetch calls during screen creation. This will improve performance with big tables and complex views.

• New modules, AddOns and demo applications (optional)

  The VaadinAddon can be used to create a custom widgetset or theme. The AppTeste is an automatic UI test tool. There is a new demo application for testing Validators. The new reporting demo application will show all features of our reporting engine.

• Configurable EPlug ports

  It's now possible to configure the EPlug communication ports via system properties.

• Better Application signing

  Our signing mechanism now supports TSA Urls, Proxies, signing algorithms and much more.

• Service module merging

  Newly created applications will automatically merge service modules. This is an important bugfix for e.g. the profiles module.

The new version is available in your download area or as Trial version.

It is time to have a short look at Validators, what they are, how they work and how they can be used.

Okay, what are they?

A Validator is a component which is available to our customers who have purchased VisionX, it allows to quickly and easily add field validation to a form or any screen with records.

Validators in VisionX

Validators are readily available in VisionX as components which can be added to the screen.

It can be added to the screen by simply dragging it like any other component, but must be configured afterwards to know which field required validation.

There are three important properties to the Validator:

• Binding: The field to which the Validator should be bound to. This works analog to selecting to a field for an Editor.
• Automatic validate: If the validation process should be automatically performed on value changes.
  If this is checked, the Validator will listen for value changes on the specified field and will automatically run the validation action on every change. If not checked, the validation process must be run manually by calling Validator.validate() as needed.
• Hide until first validate: If the Validator should stay hidden until at least one validation was performed.
  If this is checked, the Validator will not be visible until at least its validation has been called once, afterwards it will always be visible.

Validating values

To actually validate something, we have to attach an action to the Validator which will perform the validation. This can be readily done through the VisionX action designer, which provides everything needed to create such an action and we will not go into detail on how to do this.

We will, however, have a short look at the code of a simple action.

It is a very simple action, the current value of the DataBook is checked and if it is empty, an Exception is. This is the most simple validation action one can create.

Validators in action

Once we have everything setup, we can put the Validators to good use. When the validation is performed, may it be automatically or manually, the validation actions will be invoked and if all of them return without throwing an Exception, the Validator will display a green check mark. However, if the actions should throw an Exception, the Validator will display a red "X".

Manual validation

Manually invoking the validation process as needed is quite simple by calling Validator.isValid(), which will return either true or false.

Above you see a sample action which manually performs the validation process and either saves the data or sets an error label to visible.

The ValidationResult

One can quickly end up with many Validators in a single screen, which might make it difficult for the user to directly see why a field is not correctly validated. So it suggest itself that there should be a short summary close to the save button to make sure that the user is readily provided with the information why the action could not be performed. For this scenario there is the ValidationResult, which is another component which can be added to the screen from the toolbox.

It will automatically find all Validators in the screen and will perform their validation as needed. Afterwards it will gather all error messages and display them in a list.

The ValidationResult can be used similar to the Validator in an action.

Additionally, there is the clearMessage() method which allows to clear the list of errors.

Conclusion

The Validator and ValidationResult provide quick and easy means to add data validation to forms and screens with records and can be added and configured completely through the VisionX designer. Additionally, it provides a rich API which allows it to be easily used when writing the code manually or extending it with additional functionality.