Servoy 5.2 Open Source
Published by admin on
Sunday, May 9, 2010 - 21:16:07
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Servoy
Yes, it’s official, the upcoming 5.2 version of the Servoy platform will be Open Source under the AGPL license.
But what does it mean exactly? Does it mean you will not have to pay for client licenses anymore (as my boss immediately believed when I announced it)?
Of course not! Open Source doesn’t necessarily mean Free!
Rather, you and I will have access to the Java sources of the developer and client, which will allow third parties to get a better understanding of the inner mechanism that drives such and such functionality, and it will ease the process of extending the platform, or patch it with bug fixes.
Does this mean that anyone will be able to do anything with the sources? Nah, although if you have an Open Source project you should be entitled to use the project and enhance it, provided that you Open Source your project too. The AGPL license being based on GPL, you project will have to be Open Source too if you want to freely use the product, otherwise, you will simply continue buying licenses for commercial development you do.
Open Source means access to the source, and as Jan said it in the Press release, it will benefit the worldwide Servoy community. The idea being:
- Vast expansion of the Servoy eco-space
- Increased developer interest
- More extensive options for developers to take control
- Community driven improvements
- Hotfixes can be executed and applied immediately
- Innovative ideas can be shared/tested around the product
That’s quite an ambitious program here, in any case really good news that they are moving towards it!
How I understand it, is that there will be a read-only access to the Servoy SVN repository, meaning that you will be able to build your own version of the platform, and if you find a bug or write an enhancement, you will be able to create a patch against that SVN version and submit it for review to Servoy. Then, depending on the pertinence of your patch, and the orientation that they want the ‘official’ version to follow, they will accept it or not in the SVN trunk. This is how it goes for most of the major platforms (Eclipse being one).
One thing that will be needed also to make this a real Open Source community, is an open support system with a voting system, which will allow every registered users of Servoy to have a say in what are the priorities. This works very well in Eclipse for example where you get a fixed set of votes (20) that you can use on bug fixes/feature requests, the more vote, the more priority a bug fix or feature enhancement will have. This voting system and open issue tracking is an essential part of building a community around a product, and I hope that they are not going to forget about it.
In any case, we will soon have the details of all this, let’s just say for now that there is good hope for an even wider community-driven Servoy platform!
Kudos for this to the Servoy team!
The browser Suite is here! Check it out!
Published by admin on
Friday, November 20, 2009 - 03:18:45
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Servoy, Java
As demonstrated ‘live’ during Servoy Camp by the mysterious Mister P. (ask Bob Cusik about it) this ’sweet’ suite of native components (Web Browser, Flash Player and Html Editor) is ready for you to try on Servoy 5!
You will find it on the related page of the main site.
Soon on this very blog you will hear everything about the making of this stuff, all the nitty, all the gritty, all the details… but first I have to recover from a very bad flu thanks to the nice Denham climate.
You will hear about the battle to get this stuff work on all major platforms, why Mac OS X is such a case in itself and all the fun stuff involving Mac threading model, the Eclipse SWT bugzilla system being my best friend, how I went to Canada to work with a french guy with 6h delay in communication, and generally why I was so quiet during these last weeks…
I could write a book about it, but fear not, I will spare you the thread dump ;-)
Soon I will put up a google-code site or sourceforge.net site to give access to the source. I still need to find a way to publish the 4 related Eclipse projects along with the configuration stuff and installer related files in an easy to use SVN or CVS repository, with as little manual tweaking required as possible.
In the meantime, if you do try the stuff, I’d like to hear about it: the whole idea of releasing this stuff before v1 is to get as much feedback as possible on the widest range of configurations, uses and abuses, and get as much DETAILED report as possible.
So email me your bug reports, feature requests, suggestions, comments, insults and everything you want to say about it, using the contact form or via PM on the Servoy forum.
Enjoying a little (productive) break!
Published by admin on
Friday, August 7, 2009 - 07:01:03
- Filed under General, News, Servoy
Back from holiday, after finishing part 7 of the bean tutorial, I enjoyed a little break: you would think that it’s all about lying in the sun with a beer and a good book, would you?
Instead, I spent a few evenings creating a new and exciting bean (that goes a lot quicker when you don’t have to explain each little step in details in tutorials :) This is still confidential, but hopefully I will soon release this new bean as open source, wait for it!
I also start to playing with… Tano.
This release is really impressive, even for a beta!
There are a few quirks here and there, but that’s expected; not all the features are that necessary but some of them are really must-have, and when I spend the day at work with Servoy 4.1.3, I dream of doing things differently and I already build my new solution with Tano in perspective…
In short, all in all, the engineering team did a grand job!
There are new stuff for everyone, but from the point of view of building plugins and beans the new API sure do look bigger :)
[Read More…]
Auto menu System in Servoy
Published by admin on
Sunday, July 26, 2009 - 03:18:45
- Filed under General, News, Development, Servoy
For a project that is coming, I needed to test a navigation/menu system that would be entirely driven by a database…
So I started playing with this little solution to see what would be possible, and in the end I had a system with automatic menus, i18n compatible, Servoy security model compatible that works in the smart client AND the web client.
It is based on the popumenu plugin, a little bit of the solutionModel to build the menu from labels, and a few more tricks using the web_client_utils plugin…
Althought it’s far from being finished (still quite a lot of work to do, like the menu management form that really needs to be fool-proofed), and even if the look of it could definitively be improved both in the smart and the web client - I’m not the king of CSS to be honest :), I thought that some people would find this useful to get an idea of how the popupmenu plugin worked, so I decided to publish this little thing, it’s full of little tricks that I’m sure will help some newcomers in Servoy.
You can find it in the “others” section of the Servoy Stuff main site.
Busy again :)) - update
Published by admin on
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 - 15:30:28
- Filed under General, News, Plugins/beans, Servoy, Java
In the end I have found a workaround for the plugin problem in Firefox and in modal dialogs in IE. (A few minutes after I had finished the last blog entry in fact :))
You temember that it was the fact that I needed to add some code to the html header for the plugin call to work, mainly <script src=”…”> tags for jQuery and blockUI plugin, a CSS reference and some custom method code…
I discovered that Firefox didn’t like the insertion from an Ajax call, and IE didn’t like it either in case of a modal dialog. When you actualized you page, the code was added in the header from the previous call to the plugin (and was there for each subsequent calls), so it was OK after the first use.
That really annoyed me for a while…
And I was going to ask for a feature request for some static method in a global IPageContributor, or something like a addPermanentHeaderContribution() method (which I still think could be a great addition to the API), but I was not having too much hope to see it anytime soon.
So I imagined that if I couldn’t rely on the API to do it, maybe I could ask the user, so I added a prepare() method to the plugin to be used in the onShow event of the form where you will lately call the plugin (it doesn’t work in the onLoad though, for some reason). And that did the trick!
So if you plan to use the plugin in the web client on a form, you just need to add this code in a method called by the the “onShow” event of the form:
if (application.getApplicationType() == 5) {
plugins.busy.prepare();
}
That’s it, and it only took me a few lines in 3 classes!
So the morale of the story is: if the API can’t do it, ask your users to do it instead ;-)
Busy again :))
Published by admin on
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 - 04:47:11
- Filed under General, News, Plugins/beans, Servoy, Java
Admit it, you thought I was on holiday!
5 days without a post, and you thought: that’s it! It wasn’t meant to be, he just got tired of it this time!
Truly I needed some vacations from the tutorial series, the last one was big and took a long time to do (37 pages!), and I fear that the next part will be big too. So to make for some recreation, I had been busy again… on the busy plugin!
This time I had the plan to make it web compatible…
This is all because deep inside, I have this foolish belief that every plugins and beans should be web compatible, or not exist at all! That’s right! To be true to the platform, every single thing you do in the smart client SHOULD have its counterpart for the web client. As my daughter repeated after seeing Peter Pan lately:
“I do believe in fairies, I do, I do!”
In fact, I’m already dreaming of a web compatible JSplitPane… I have some wild ideas about it but I can’t tell right now if will be able to do it or not, I haven’t started it yet! There are so many amazing things you can do with javascript widgets nowadays and so many nice javascript frameworks around that I can’t believe that it will be impossible. Split panes browser implementations in JavaScript already exists, so why not make them available in Servoy? Something for later…
In the meantime I settled to work on an easy one. Or so I thought!
The busy plugin - for those of you who don’t know it - has been released lately as open source by Scott “Servoy Guy” Buttler. I have been made contibutor to the project on google code so I wanted to see how easy it would be to make a web compatible version out of it.
[Read More…]
Tutorial 2 - Part 5: Wicked!
Published by admin on
Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - 15:42:58
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Servoy, Java
Sorry about the title, I just couldn’t resist :))
In this one we build a Servoy-Aware input bean of type Text, with a JTextField for the Swing part and a Panel and TextField for the Wicket part. And then we link the two with an IServoyBeanFactory implementation.
It’s packed with 37 pages of condensed information, reduced to the simplest (!), but there is a lot to chew in there for those of you who don’t know Wicket at all and/or are new in Java… So take the time to read, tests, and re-read if necessary, and go on the internet to know more about Wicket.
I hope that I managed to make everything clear and that it will be helpful to all!
In the next part we will go back to our SliderBean to start laying the ground for the Wicket part of it.
In the meantime you will find this part 5 in the tutorials section of the Servoy Stuff main site, as usual!
Tutorial 2 - Part 4: hot delivery!
Published by admin on
Wednesday, July 8, 2009 - 15:02:24
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Servoy, Java
Burning hot this one, I tell you!
You will learn how to turn a plain old JSlider into a full fledged input component ready to drop onto your Servoy solution, using a dataProvider, and with some cool enhancements like i18n readiness, support for double and floating point numbers with adjustable “on-the-fly” precision factor.
Yes, sir! That’s all on the menu. You ordered it! You got it!
You will also learn more about the “uncertainty principle”, some refactoring tricks in Eclipse, digging into the Swing sources, and a few more niceties…
If you can’t make some good cofee with this bean tutorial, there’s no more hope for me.
Download the stuff right were it belong, in the tutorials section of the Servoy Stuff main website.
Tutorial 2 - Part 3: how to polish your beans!
Published by admin on
Sunday, July 5, 2009 - 00:39:09
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Servoy, Java
That’s right!
With this one, your beans will get this shiny little touch that only professional beans truly have!
Get it in the tutorials section of the Servoy Stuff main site.
After this one, you will be ready for the next installment of this tutorial where we will see some other usages of the bean and how to code them.
In the meantime, happy 4th to all of you celebrating out there!
Tutorial 2 - Part 2: The plot thickens!
Published by admin on
Thursday, July 2, 2009 - 07:12:35
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Servoy, Java
This time in Java, you will have fun with JSliders with this brand new tutorial.
With this one, you will surprise all your friends at the cocktail party, with the definitive answer to the quintessential question: now what is wrong with regular Java-Beans?
After the Da Vinci code, they will learn everything about the ServoySlider bean project (very hush hush stuff :)
In the old days, they had style, now you will have ServoySlider class! :))
Get it now in the tutorials section of the Servoy stuff main site.
