VelocityReport plugin history
Published by admin on
Monday, April 26, 2010 - 06:53:51
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
Jeff Bader contacted me a few months ago because he wanted to Open Source his nice XhtmlRenderer plugin. Basically he couldn’t find the time to support it anymore and he thought that it was kind of competing with the BrowserSuite, so he asked me if I would be interesting in porting it to Servoy 5 and see what could be made out of it.
At the time, I didn’t really know what to do, I knew about the plugin but had never tested it, and I had no real idea how to make it relevant after all the effort I already put into the Browser Suite.
Then, a few weeks later, my boss came to my office with one of her crazy ‘on-the-fly’ requirements for a future project… The project was not that difficult (it involved some kind of management tool to create surveys and to gather results in Servoy), but there was one part that was a bit frightening in it: she showed me the kind of reports she wanted to output from the data gathered. It was 8 to 10 pages long, with each pages having a different structure, one with a simple text, with paragraphs and styles, the second with a table of 8 column and another table of 4 columns (with one big column of text and little results column and background colors to show a kind of graph of the values), the next one with some charts and explanations underneath, etc.
All along I thought: god, it’s going to be a nightmare to create this kind of report dynamically with Servoy and Jasper Reports.
And then I remembered that the last time I had a seemingly impossible report to create in Jasper, I actually did it in HTML in no time! It was for a calendar tool that I have made (in Java, web-based, not in Servoy), with a monthly view of 7 columns x weeks and different ‘events’ with background colors and a certain number of lines of text inside each cell.
I did it in HTML and used the xhtmlrenderer library (aka the Flying Saucer project). What was nice about it was the CSS capabilities of that libary and the fact that it was dead easy to create PDF with CSS styling.
So remembering my usage of the xhtmlrenderer lib to output a report, and knowing that there was this plugin waiting for me to put my nose into it, putting all this together, I saw the light! (It happens to me too, sometimes :)
[Read More…]
Signed beans/plugins for Servoy Stuff
Published by admin on
Friday, April 23, 2010 - 03:34:30
- Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
Following the latest Java 6 update 19 fiasco, followed a few days later by another buggy release 20, which was forced on our throat thanks to Oracle total lack of care for us developers (without any beta like it was always the case when Sun was… Sun), you will find from now on that every plugins/beans available for download on the Servoy Stuff site will be signed by “Patrick Talbot Open Source Developer”.
This certificate has been provided thanks to the generous offer of Certum CA, a Certificate Authority recognized by Sun in the JVM (works on Mac OS X too, don’t worry!). They offer FREE one year (renewable) certificate for Open Source developers and I am the proof that it’s for real, and this is an initiative that must be applauded these days where companies like Oracle clearly don’t care a bit about us developers, except for our money, I mean.
So once they have installed this certificate (which will be the case when they accept the first time to run Servoy with one of the plugin/bean used in your solution), your clients will never hear about me again, which is fine because I’m shy, really ;-)
On another note, I have found this article on the JavaLobby DZone site which I’m sure you will enjoy as much as I have (the author you know already ;-)
I think we should all support the author who is expressing here some reasonable concern and offering reasonable solutions. The more we all make noise about it, the more Oracle might have its ears scratching and who knows… they might be listening.
I know another company who recently showed that they were ;-)
Java 6u19 and other news
Published by admin on
Monday, April 12, 2010 - 00:11:33
- Filed under General, News
Hi there!
Time flies when you are having fun… I see that my last post was celebrating the 5000 visits and today there are more than 7300 already! I haven’t blog too much lately, again quite busy on some new project that I hope you will like (this is soon to be launched in preview, hold on a little!).
Following the advent of Java 6 update 19 that now add a new constraints to third party plugins/beans, I have updated all the beans/plugins available on the Servoy Stuff site with signed versions as well.
You need to know that if a client (with java 6u19) is trying to connect to Servoy with a smart client and if some of your plugins/beans in your application_server/plugins and application_server/beans are not signed they will not be able to launch their client!
Servoy just updated Servoy 5 to 5.1.2 and Servoy 4 to 4.1.6 to workaround this problem, basically signing all the jar libs they are shipping. Make sure you update. Then to be able to work with third party these must be signed as well.
This is why I now provide signed version of all jars. The only problem is that this is signed with a self-signed certificate, meaning that I didn’t pay a signing authority to confirm that I am who I say I am, (I think I already pay a lot with my time here, and to be quite honest I’m too broke to even consider buying one, to give it to others)… Always a question of money in the end, isn’t it? Now if you want to sponsor me with a real certificate I’d be happy to resign all the plugins and beans for real ;-) but in the meantime the self-signing certificate is working anyway, there is just a nagging screen that your users will see stating that the certificate cannot be verified, and if they want more info, they will see that this is signed by ‘Servoy Stuff’.
Maybe that’s not what you want, in which case you can also sign the plugins/beans yourself, just use the nifty testsigner tool that Johan Compagner just put on the forum, donwload the tool and follow his instructions here: http://forum.servoy. … &t=13974#p73294
Talk to you soon with some new and exciting plugin that will take your reporting in Servoy to the next level…
