What’s New In Servoy 6
Thank you for joining me for this video, What’s New as your Voice 6? For Servoy University, I’m Bob Cusick. In this PowerPoint presentation, I’m going to give you an overview of what’s New in Sir Voice 6. There’s literally thousands of new features in Sir Voice, but unfortunately we don’t have time to go through every single one of them. I’m going to hit the high points here, including a new installer, there’s a new welcome screen, a new forms designer, and this thing is really greatly enhanced. I think this is one of the biggest features that’s new in Sir Voice 6. There’s also new cascading stylesheet editor, so when you’re editing your styles, you can see all of the available objects. There’s a new JavaScript builder that will point out coding errors that you have within your code right in line. And for the first time, you can refactor or rename objects in your JavaScript code, and it will roll through the entire solution. There’s other great enhancements, including the ability to get rid of that background, row, color calculation, and style all of your row styles right in your style sheet. There’s a new on-render form event, a new windowing API, a greatly enhanced inheritance model, a vastly improved drag and drop event that allows you to get the record object of the thing that you’re dragging and the thing that you’re dropping. And you now have the ability to start the server as a service on all platforms. Now let’s take a look a little bit deeper at each one of these in a little bit more detail. Let’s start at the beginning with the new installer. This is a new integrated installer. This will allow you to install either Servoy developer or Sir Voice application server all from one server. And it also gives you the capability to start the application server as a service on all platforms. There’s also a brand new welcome screen. That’s the screen you see when you first start up Sir Voice for the very first time. Now it’s been completely redesigned, and it’s sort of a jumping off point of all things Sir Voice. There’s all kinds of links there to features and Sir Voice Forge, the marketplace, the forum. It’s got the latest releases with clickable links right on the front page. There’s linked to blog posts and Twitter feeds. It’s a really great and helpful addition. This is a quick screenshot that shows you what I mean. It’s very easy to navigate and very easy to see at a glance what’s going on in the world of Servoy. And if you click on the what’s happening tab, you can see all the latest blog entries and live Twitter feeds. This new forum designer is probably the biggest feature in Sir Voice 6.0. It’s been completely redesigned for greater developer productivity. One of the things that you’ll notice is this Azure drag alignment guides. And these are really cool. So as you drag objects on the screen, you’ll see a blue outline where they touch other objects or where they align with other objects. You’ll also notice in the forum designer that fields have anchoring decorators. These are little gray boxes that appear to the right of each field that show you at a glance how each object is anchored. So top and left, top and right, etc. You can see how the anchored at a glance rather than having to click on every object and take a look at all of the properties associated or right click on the object and see how they’re anchored. You can see now at a glance how everything is anchored. There’s also a new field decorator for light sized objects. So in the screenshot, there’s a button that’s been selected and you can see that the button above it has a height indicator and a width indicator telling you that the button above it is the same height and the same width as the selected object. On the button below it, you can see it only has the width decorator. This tells you that the button is not the same height but it is the same width. And finally, the button on the bottom, it’s the opposite. So it’s the same height but not the same width. So again, this will really help you as you’re laying out your form, you’re laying out your objects, you don’t have to guess if you’re one pixel to the right or to the left or if this object is a little bit smaller than that one, you can visually see it with these optional decorators. Now all of these decorators and the alignment guides are completely configurable. There are preferences for all of these decorators and the new alignment guides. You can even set up your own grid styles and how far you want objects to move when you use the control keys. There’s a new in-line object palette when you’re editing a form. In previous versions of Sir Boy, because the forms require additional objects in the tool, sometimes the toolbars would jump around at the top. Now when you click on a form object, you’ll see this palette appear with all of the object types. They have these little folders, elements and containers, all kinds of other things that you can configure and you can make them look as a list or with icons, but it allows you to drag objects from that and put it right onto the form. You can also click to place items. This is really great, and it will stop your toolbar from jumping all around every time you go between a method and a form. Then there’s the new CSS style editor. First of all, notice that the code is color coded. All of your styles now take on the color coding so you can make out what are objects and what are properties. Check out the properties palette on the right-hand side. This gives you a list of all the CSS properties that Sir Boy supports, all in one easy-to-see list. Now there’s a lot of stuff going on with the new JavaScript builder. You’re going to see a lot more flags during your coding because it’s going to automatically identify when you have duplicate variables or you redefine the same variable or you haven’t defined a variable but you use it. So there’s all these great markers that help you write clean code. Now there can be a lot of markers, especially when you’re opening up solutions that you built in prior versions of Sir Boy, but don’t panic. This will actually help you write cleaner, more compact code. The new JavaScript builder also uses JS doc with some enhancements so that you can refactor your code. Refactry simply means auto updating of an object wherever it’s used within your solution. Have you ever written a method and then you wanted to rename it and then you had to do a find and replace and go and replace it wherever it is? Well if you use JS doc notations throughout your scripts, Sir Boy will go ahead and parse those for you and it will automatically figure out where things need to go and where things need to be. Plus it will also help the auto complete be a lot more accurate and give you much better suggestions as you type. It does mean however that you need to put JS doc information on every method and in some cases within your method. But don’t worry we’ll go ahead and get into the JS doc stuff in another video. So as I said there’s literally hundreds of new major and minor updates. You can get the full listing of everything this brand new in Sir Boy at wiki. Sir Boy.com and here at Servoy University we’re also going to restructure our as I said there’s literally hundreds of new major and minor updates in Sir Boy 6.0. If you want to read about every single one of them go ahead and go to the wiki at wiki. Sir Boy.com. Things are also changing here at Sir Boy University. We’re going to focus on helping you accomplish tasks. We’re going to make our videos shorter and more information and more based on getting a task done. Again all in the hopes that you’ll be even more productive in your Sir Boy development. Thank you all for your wonderful feedback and ideas. You spoke. We’ve listened. For Sir Boy University I’m Bob Kuesick.