Silbergrau blue PE Release Announcement

Silbergrau blue Professional Edition
Release Candidate 1

Silbergrau blue Professional Edition (PE) is a special version of Silbergrau blue Enterprise Edition specifically designed to fulfill the needs of small to medium sized software development organizations and individuals. It is a full blown version of Silbergrau blue which is limited to certain environments (application servers, databases, servers) and does not contain the Enterprise Features of Silbergrau blue Enterprise Edition, e.g. Host Integration, Portal- and Content Management System. Instead, runtime licenses are included. 

Best of Breed Open Source Development

Silbergrau blue PE integrates some the best pieces of Open Source Software available for software development today. This includes the integration of well established Open Source Java Frameworks and tools such as various Apache Jakarta projects (e.g. Xerces, Xalan) or JUnit as well as the integration of Open Source base systems (e.g. Tomcat). Silbergrau blue seamlessly integrates these products on base of standard interfaces and provides a single, standard-based container to these base systems. For you and your application it does not matter whether you are using a full blown industrial strength Application Server as base infrastructure or a "simple" Open Source container such as Tomcat or JBoss. The same happens with databases, http-servers and operating systems. Even more, Silbergrau blue allows you to use one base infrastructure for development and tests and switch to another infrastructure for production - without changing the application code!

This opens a variety of possibilities for developers: Without dealing with the various frameworks, Silbergrau blue enables you to

• build commercial software solutions on top of "free" infrastructures;
• use Open Source Software without digging in the deeps of thousands of framework classes and without the need to integrate and test the various frameworks based systems;
• combine the usage of well established and free Open Source Software with the support and integration work of Silbergrau;
• be able to switch from free base software products to commercial products and vice versa without even changing your application code;
• use well established and secure Open Source Software for your mission critical web software solutions;
• improve the value of your Software products;
• ...

Silbergrau blue and Open Source

To illustrate our commitment to Open Source and to ease development, Silbergrau blue PE now even contains parts of the source code of the Silbergrau blue framework! This source code is distributed under the accompanying license and may be used for Silbergrau blue development. Use and read the provided code to understand and to learn from Silbergrau blue. And use this code to be able to easily extend and adopt Silbergrau blue.

Silbergrau blue Integrated Environment and Setup

Silbergrau blue PE delivers a comprehensive set of tools, libraries, runtime environments, testing environments, documentation and samples - it is something we at Silbergrau call an Application Container, a container which provides comprehensive and easy to use infrastructure for your application - not only technical infrastructure. And we think it is one of the first Application Containers available.

And of course, setup is integrated and simple.

 Silbergrau blue Development Tools - Eclipse Integration

Silbergrau blue PE is now fully integrated into the Open Source Eclipse software development environment. This integration includes the integration of the setup program as well as the integration of Silbergrau blue software development tools. (Note: the Enterprise version of Silbergrau blue may also be used with other development environments, e.g. IBM Application Developer).

Silbergrau blue PE provides an integrated set of tools and plugins to ease development. These tools are tightly integrated into Eclipse and may be activated through separate menus as well as via context menus.

ProjectWizard

Silbergrau blue provides wizards to handle the creation of projects. Just click on new project and choose whether to create a new Web project or a project without Web support. The wizard will create the project for you, add all necessary library information, jar files, configuration files etc.

ModelWizard

The ModelWizard provides a graphical user interface to define and configure (persistent) business objects and constraints. It, too, generates accessors and deals with relationships between business objects. It is easy to handle: just click on your business class and open the blue-context menu. Change the settings as desired and click ok. The wizard will handle all changes, generate code, provide class configuration etc.

SystemConfigurationEditor

The SystemConfigurationEditor is a graphical user interface to configure application parameters such as data sources, (web-) services, sessions, conversations, logging, factories etc.

It helps you to

• easily configure Silbergrau blue applications beyond the basic configurations of J2EE web.xml files;
• configure Silbergrau blue applications without touching configuration files and without digging into the details of J2EE applications.
• configure and test (pooled) data sources as well as the whole J2EE application (files, database configuration, resources).

And: SystemConfigurationEditor provides deployment facilities to make your life easier: just open the context menu of your project and export the application. The SystemConfigurationEditor packages the application, copies all necessary, referenced libraries, copies license and configuration files and generates the WAR file for you.

Of course, the SystemConfigurationEditor is tightly integrated with the Tomcat integration and "knows" about your testing environment and Application Server.

Tomcat Integration

Silbergrau blue provides a tight Tomcat integration based on a modified and enhanced SysDeo plugin: start, top, restart your testing environment with integrated project settings: just setup your Tomcat properties within your project and everything else, including configuration of the Tomcat server, is handled automatically. And, of course, this enables integrated debugging and testing without "extra" deployment cycles.

JMap

For testing purposes Silbergrau provides JMap, an integrated tool to create database schema based on object models: JMap will deal with the database connection, create tables and indices. It also will drop old tables and indices if necessary, write SQL log file and much more.

The usage is simple: just open JMap by activating it within the blue menu and JMap will present a menu with all Silbergrau blue projects contained in your workspace browse. Select one and add the business class you would like to generate the database schema for. Again, JMap browses your workspace to present the list of available classes to you. Select classes and generate the schema - that is all!

Please note:

• Silbergrau blue now provides the feature, a functionality to create database schema on the fly without further intervention. This may make the usage of tools like JMap obsolete.

JSPGenerator

For testing purposes Silbergrau provides JSPGenerator, an integrated tool to create default thin client applications for model classes. JSPGenerator creates master-/detail-pages with various actions (first page, last page, previous/next page, new, edit, delete etc.).

The usage is as simple as the usage of JMap: just open JSPGenerator by activating it within the blue menu and JSPGenerator will present a menu with all Silbergrau blue projects contained in your workspace browse. Select one and add the business class you would like to generate the database schema for. Again, JSPGenerator browses your workspace to present the list of available classes to you. Select classes, choose which pages and actions to generate and generate the default application - that is all!

Please note:

• Silbergrau blue now contains a which provide enhanced functionality (grid tags, date controls, dialog handling, state management) and make large parts of the functionality of JSPGenerator obsolete. JSPGenerator does not support these new tags and may be discontinued in the next versions of Silbergrau blue.

Some of the new Silbergrau blue features since Version 1.0

Silbergrau blue PE contains a lot of new features which ease development. Some of them are described below.

HotDeploy

Silbergrau blue is able to deploy object models on the fly to any supported database. This means that you no longer have to create classes and then - manually or with tool support - create tables with the database. Instead, with HotDeploy, you just create your business classes and start your application. HotDeploy handles everything else for you on the fly: it checks the database and finds out which tables to create. It then creates the tables on the fly and continues the execution of the application.

This makes application development cycles simple and fast: code your business classes, code your test cases and start them. Nothing else ...

Within the SystemConfigurationEditor you may specify whether HotDeploy is activated or not. (In most cases you will only use it during development).



Note:

• This feature may make obsolete.
  

ObjectQueryEngine

Silbergrau blue PE contains the first implementation of the Silbergrau ObjectQueryEngine (OQE). OQE allows the specification of queries in Java (!) - Silbergrau blue takes this source code, analyzes the code and builds database queries. All this happens on the fly!

Service Oriented Architecture

Silbergrau blue PE contains a full blown WebService infrastructure which allows you to use WebServices as a base object model without any "infrastructural programming": Just define which methods of your business model should be available from the outside and Silbergrau blue will provide the appropriate interfaces. It automatically configures the WebServices, deploys them and makes them available to the outside world.

Even more, Silbergrau blue allows you to seamlessly use functionality provided by WebServices (e.g. .Net applications) and to provide Silbergrau blue functionality to other application (e.g. .Net applications). It provides a comprehensive type framework to for conversion and SOAP handling, it knows about "local" and "remote" services and automatically calls local services via Java mechanisms thus providing improved performance. And of course, SOA includes test environments and tools, base libraries, security implementation and more.

Compare this to today's popular WebService implementations: Silbergrau blue SOA does not "provide means to create or program WebServices". Your programmers do not deal with the "programming of WebServices". We think, this is the wrong way. Instead, Silbergrau blue provides a complete infrastructure which allows you to transparently use WebServices as your "component model". Create your applications and tell Silbergrau blue which of your "services" should be available to the outside world as WebServices. And tell Silbergrau blue which of existing WebServices to use. That is all. No SOAPs within your code. It is the application that matters, not the infrastructure.

Please note:

• SOA is provided for tests.
• This implementation is shipped as an extra part and may not be included in your shipment. If SOA is not included, you may contact for the AddOn.
• For details and documentation see the excerpt of the "Inside blue" documentation which may be contained within your shipment. If this document is not included, contact for further information.
  

New Advanced Tag Libraries

Silbergrau blue PE provides a new, complete and comprehensive set of tags. These tags include

• data grids,
• lists,
• date controls,
• trees with integrated scroll bars,
• time controls,
• combo boxes,
• ...

Even more: Silbergrau blue PE now handles multiple windows (conversations), "real" dialogs even within Web environments, nested dialogs, wizards ...

Some screenshots to illustrate some of the tags ...

Please note:

Performance

Many performance improvements have been implemented since Version 1.00, e.g. an increased number of methods (e.g. EntityCollection.size) is now directly evaluated through database queries, or EntityCollections caching.

New Databases supported

Support for new databases: Silbergrau blue PE now supports MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle and DB2. Support includes the support for the new, much faster, DB2 database drivers as well as the support for BLOBs/CLOBs on DB2 and Oracle. In fact, Silbergrau blue may support many more databases as databases are integrated on base of JDBC 2.0 - these are the databases officially tested for use with Silbergrau blue. See the FactSheet for details and versions.

New Application Servers supported

Silbergrau blue PE supports a broad range of Application Servers. However, for Silbergrau blue applications to be run on e.g. WebSphere, Weblogic or other commercial containers, a valid license is needed (not included in the PE edition).

Documentation and Support

Silbergrau blue PE now contains JavaDoc, taglib documentation, additional PDF-documentation and new samples ready to use. Seen apart from these, Silbergrau provides online support for customers with

• a Bugzilla-based issue tracking system (called "bluezilla");
• a blue discussion forum;
• a WikiWiki based interactive knowledge management system ("brain").

More samples are provided which illustrate the usage of new tags, the new ThinClient user interface, sessions & conversations, dialogs and wizards and advanced server features such as queries, oqe WebServices ...

 your blue team