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.
Tutorial 2 - Part 7: put a Slider in your browser!
Published by admin on
Monday, August 3, 2009 - 15:33:00
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Java
Back from holidays with this new part for you: this time our Slider bean will work in a browser just like a real Slider should, with the help of some JavaScript magic :)
It takes some tweaking with JavaScript and some more Java coding of Wicket Behavior to do that, but if you’ve gone this far, the end result will be rewarding enough!
So get ready and download the stuff from the tutorials section of the Servoy Stuff main site and enjoy this new and exciting tutorial.
In the next (and hopefully final) part we will have a look at events handling with call-back to Servoy’s JavaScript methods.
Enjoy!
Tutorial 2 - Part 6: ServoySlider got promoted!
Published by admin on
Tuesday, July 28, 2009 - 05:25:24
- Filed under News, Development, Plugins/beans, Java
Yet another big tutorial in the never ending series.
That’s 26 more pages more, making it 200 pages already - I didn’t do it on purpose but that’s a nice round number, so I’m celebrating!
This time, we applied everything we learned in part 5 from our little detour with the TestBean to our ServoySlider, promoting it to level 1 of Web compatibility: while in the Smart client it acts like the Slider we all love (and more) in the Web client it’s still a stupid text field, so that your users will be able to input a value, but that’s about it.
You realize then that we will definitely need a seventh part (at least) to transform our text field into a nice JavaScript DHTML driven Slider. So brace yourself for yet some more changes to our bean, this will come in due time!
You can get this part from the tutorials section of the Servoy Stuff main site, as usual.
One thing you should note, though, is that I am actually on holidays. For real, this time! :))
So this should leave you enough time to digest the 200 pages so far, because you really need some time on your agenda to check these, before the next part will be published…
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.
Tutorial 1 - Part 2 is complete
Published by admin on
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 - 07:33:47
- Filed under News, Announcements, Development, Plugins/beans, Java
24 pages full of dirty details, it’s here already!
Another bulky tutorial that will leave nothing in the dark!
But to quote another Servoy/Java addict: “I’ll be back!” ;-)
Enjoy!
