Servoy 4.1 Released!

Yes, I have been in a cave for the past couple of weeks... but the reason has been that I've been working on getting Servoy 4.1 ready for release - and today, ta da - it's finally here. I've written another blog entry with the gory details over at the Servoy corporate blog: http://blog.servoy.com.

The main uptick in this version (well, there are a few which you can read about here) - is the fact that you can create objects on-the-fly - and still have them "bound" to the Servoy infrastructure. What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

Well, here's the deal: In other environments, you can also create objects on-the-fly, but you have to also do all the coding to "hook them up". In Servoy 4.1, all you need to do is to create them - and they're automatically hooked up. They function in the web automatically, will auto-save automatically, will data broadcast changes automatically, etc.

That's with a single line code - the code that creates the object. Nice.

The interesting thing about the new capabilities in Servoy is that you can create just about every type of object that you can when you're in the IDE, but you can do it on the fly. This includes the ability to create new forms, fields, tabpanels, buttons, portals, etc. These are all just objects that would normally get created by Servoy at runtime anyway - but Servoy 4.1 now gives you programmatic control over their creation as well.

Basically, all of the properties you have available at design-time in the IDE are now programmable. You can create custom forms from scratch, or based them on existing forms. You can create headers, footers, leading and trailing summaries, title footers, title headers, etc. This means you can create complex reports that are sub-summarized by multiple columns - all on-the-fly at runtime.

Oh yeah, and you can also attach methods (scripts) to all of the events that you have on all objects (including forms) as well. That allows you to specify what happens when events fire on the form or object level (onDataChange, onFocusGained, onFocusLost, onDoubleClick, etc.).

Another interesting thing about Servoy 4.1 - is that it allows you to create data-reated objects at runtime as well. You can create relations between tables as well as valuelists that can have custom values as well as ones that are based on a database (or relation). Now, that's revolutionary. I don't know how the engineering team managed to pull that one off - but's really an awesome feat!

If all of that wasn't enough for you - beacause you can modify EXISTING forms at runtime as well - you can totally customize the user interface per user group - or even individual users. You can re-assign existing fields to different database columns, add columns (or remove them) from a listing, add a new tabpanel, etc.

There's a new example file with the 4.1 download (which, by the way is the FREE Community Edition with free Developer and 5 concurrent clients for non-commercial use!) - that's called "servoy_sample_solutionModel" that gives you an idea how you can build a 100% dynamic data viewer with both list views and data entry views.

Also, if you're around TOMORROW, Wednesday, December 3rd at 10:00am PST (1:00pm EST) and you want to see more - I'm doing a webinar entitled "What's New In Servoy 4.1". The webinar is an hour long and is free - but you do have to register here to attend.

If you haven't tried Servoy out before - now's a great time to check it out! If you're even thinking about creating a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering - or you're ready to modernize your application - having a look at Servoy is well worth your time!