Servoy 5 - upcoming features

13 August 2009

Beginning in March, Servoy has included in their monthly newsletter a "Servoy Labs Inside Scoop" section, offering a view into what Servoy engineers are working on (or just playing with) ... but without any promise that "you will see this in the next release."

Well, News Flash! In the August Servoy Newsletter we read that all the good stuff described in the newsletters will be included in Servoy 5! Here at -ade we want to start thinking ahead to what great new application features will become available when Servoy 5 is released, so we have gone back through past newsletters to compile this list.

Partial list of new features to expect in Servoy 5:

.... from the March 2009 Servoy Newsletter

• Global keyboard shortcuts:
  Imagine being able to register shortcuts on a global level that can trigger Servoy methods in both Servoy Smart Client and Servoy Web Client.
• Form level element onFocus events:
  For Servoy developers who write generic code: How about assigning a generic Servoy method to process onFocus gained and/or onFocus lost events at the form level; as well as passing on the object that triggers the method -- enabling you to hook up your custom code?

.... from the April 2009 Servoy Newsletter

• Drag & Drop (D&D) support
  As promised to you as at last year's ServoyWorld. How about using Drag & Drop for events on data, or being able to Drag & Drop Servoy objects like fields and labels? What about having Drag & Drop capability in both Servoy Smart Client and Servoy Web Client?
• Resizing elements
  ... in Servoy Web Client! Imagine being able to "draw" UI elements in a browser, and then persist that drawn element back to your Servoy application.

.... from the May 2009 Servoy Newsletter

• Servoy Smart Client running over the internet much faster!
  Servoy Smart Client is a technology that can be used to deploy and run applications over the internet, as fast or faster than with Microsoft Remote Desktop or over a Citrix connection, but without needing additional third-party software. Servoy Smart Client applications (Remote Desktop has had the same problem) have run slower as distance increases from the server and/or bandwidth is reduced -- until now! Two of Servoy's senior engineers have discovered, after extensive research, that RMI (Remote Method Invocation), while it is the most-used Java middleware communication layer, has some disadvantages when transmitting over long distances and lower bandwidth connections. By default, RMI does not use compression and is a "chatty" protocol -- resulting in much more rountrip "chatting" before the application data is actually sent.
  
  With the enhanced version of the Servoy RMI API, performance increases of 200-300% now enable Servoy applications to run over the internet as fast as running the same application locally. Even more exciting news is that because the results are so significant, the optimized RMI API will be included as part of the next minor release -- most probably Servoy 4.1.3!

.... from the June 2009 Servoy Newsletter

Enhancements for forms/form objects in the next major release of Servoy!

• Creating abstract forms -- forms that do not have a datasource (table) or do not have form parts.
• Changing properties of inherited objects at design time (before this was possible only at runtime).
• Being able to see arguments for events/commands in the Property pane of the Properties view.
• Specifying additional arguments to events/commands methods.
• Creating template objects -- a standard group of fields -- that will maintain their specific default properties when creating a new form.
• Much more...

.... from the July 2009 Servoy Newsletter

• Eclipse 3.5 ("Galileo") integration
  A bonus that Mac developers will appreciate is the Eclipse 3.5 GUI (Graphical User Interface) is moving to Cocoa -- which means faster, more stable development using the updated version of Eclipse on Mac OS X.
• 64-bit support
• Edit data multiple relations away
  Place dataproviders from multiple relations deep for more advanced n-m support. Now imagine what you could do with tabs over multiple relations on a tabpanel!

Wow. Huge performance boost, users can modify forms, template objects with sticky properties, keyboard shortcuts in Web Client, and drag and drop. We can't wait to sit down and plan the Servoy 5 version of our solutions!