TECH SPOTLIGHT
Showcasing Bite-Sized Nuggets of Knowledge
In the dynamic world of database management, optimizing queries is a constant pursuit. One indispensable tool in this quest is the SQL EXPLAIN statement (available in BBj® version 23.00+), a feature that provides a detailed roadmap of how BBj’s SQL engine executes queries. In this article, we’ll explore the nuances of the EXPLAIN statement and unravel its potential to unveil bottlenecks, enhance query efficiency, and empower developers to make informed decisions.
You probably know that AddonSoftware by Barista is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution that provides foundational building blocks for accounting, distribution, manufacturing, and payroll applications. You may also know that with AddonSoftware, you can tailor those building blocks to satisfy your customers’ business processes and workflow. You might even have heard that your customizations can carry through the upgrade cycle and that you can migrate your legacy BBx CUI applications to AddonSoftware, allowing you to modernize at your own pace. But what you may not know is that AddonSoftware is never holding still! Each new release adds features and functions to the core applications to further deliver productivity and efficiency benefits to the users. If you think you already know AddonSoftware, read on to learn what’s new.
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Tired of applications with the same old look? Looking for a way to spruce up your user interfaces? Want your programs to be responsive, optimizing their screen size and layout for each user’s device? Well, look no further — BASIS’ newest user interface model, the Dynamic Web Client (DWC), is here to help you do all that and more!
If you’ve heard rumblings that change is on the way (or even if you have been living in Antarctica and haven’t heard anything about it), read the newest Advantage article and see what the DWC can do for you!
In BBj 21.00, BASIS introduced BBxServlets to succeed BBjspServlets. On the surface, BBxServlets were designed to perform the same functions as BBjspServlets; however, differences under the hood make BBxServlets quicker and more efficient at handling large numbers of requests and license check-outs. For this reason, and perhaps more importantly because BBjspServlets are no longer supported, you will want to consider migrating your BBjspServlet-based applications to BBxServlets. One of the core design goals of BBxServlets was to offer ease of migration, and with some enhancements made in BBj 22.01, this process is simpler than ever. This article covers the syntax changes that you can make to your BBjspServlets to convert them to BBxServlets, as well as how to easily re-configure your servlet through both the jetty.xml file and the Admin API.
Big news! A BBjGrid control for the DWC! In early announcements about the new Dynamic Web Client (DWC), BASIS stated that the existing BBjGrid controls (the BBjStandardGrid, the BBjDataAwareGrid, and the BBjDataBoundGrid) would not be available in the DWC. Instead, mobile and responsive layout applications in the DWC would use the newer BBjGridExWidget, an industry-leading native JavaScript grid control also available for GUI and BUI clients. And for new applications developed for the DWC, the BBjGridExWidget is definitely the better choice — it offers a much larger set of end-user features (including grouping, column reordering, drill-down capabilities, and better performance with large data sets, just to name a few).
TCW is a valued BASIS customer that is an asset-based carrier performing intermodal, truckload, and less-than-truckload (LTL) services. Together with a partner, Assorted Business Services, BASIS helped migrate the solution to a supported hardware and operating system and replaced the 3rd-party components with a more feature-rich Barista Lucene-indexed document image archiving solution.
Desktop Apps, introduced in BBj® 19.20, is the BASIS replacement for Java Web Start (JWS). Oracle deprecated JWS in Java 9, and starting with Java 11, they removed JWS entirely from their distributions. When designing Desktop Apps, we removed the limitations of having complicated JNLP files, the requirement of a security certificate, and the JAR signing. We also added the ability for updates to Java, BBj, or programs to be automatically handled by the client, and for all configured applications to be available from the BBj Jetty home page via a URL.
With BBj’s new classloader model, class information is loaded one class at a time – BBj no longer needs to download an entire JAR file. Class downloading is optimized by having a cache on the server, and another cache on each client. Together with the predictive class algorithm, these caches help minimize the number of round trips between the server and client, which increases application performance – particularly on low bandwidth networks. “Loading with Class” is the second of a three-part series of Tech Spotlight articles culminating in the “Zero Deployment” capabilities of BASIS desktop applications.
BBj’s use of Java classpaths became more flexible and powerful than ever before with the release of BBj 19.10. You now have the ability to control virtually every aspect of how your BBj programs find and use Java classes. This is the first of a series of three articles culminating in the “Zero Deployment” capabilities of BASIS desktop applications.
BASIS’ AddonSoftware ERP solution continues to receive the benefits of the ever-expanding features of its core BBj language and the Barista Application Framework. The solution is uniquely positioned in the market where BASIS controls both the development of the core components and its implementation in a modern, full-featured ERP system. Three such features that greatly improve your operational efficiencies and deliver productivity gains to you and your customers are electronic payables processing, a web-based payment portal for receivables, and shipment tracking.
Database query performance is usually a top priority for administrators and users of data-driven applications. A little creativity, in conjunction with a solid understanding of how the SQL engine optimizes queries and utilizes indexes, can go a long way in coming up with solid solutions that meet the end user’s needs.
Your no cost application building blocks. One of the benefits afforded to BBj developers is that they can mix standard Business BASIC syntax with Java syntax. They can and do easily take advantage of hundreds of Java libraries leveraging tried and tested open-source application building blocks such as an email utility, a report writer, and much more!
Even if classes, methods, and objects are new to you, you do not need a Computer Science degree to write a useful dashboard program. Like traditional BBx programs that make use of external code or libraries, our dashboard example program uses custom utility classes to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to executing code. Perspectives and Projects and Views, Oh My! – A Survival Guide for New Eclipse Users
Transitioning from NetBeans to the BDT IDE and Eclipse – Who doesn’t want to turn out more work better and faster? We spotlight two articles which facilitate your usage of BASIS’ IDE that can help you do just that!
Inevitably the time will come when an administrator or manager would like to know a bit more detail about the activity occurring within BBj, whether that be for optimization, troubleshooting, or auditing purposes. The BBj Metrics feature is an excellent tool to make this task quick, easy, robust, and available in real-time.
We are proud to call MarkSystems a Platinum BASIS Partner. Their successes with application development and software solutions that meet the needs and growth of their customers have made them a leader in the industry, and a top reseller in our books. BBj continues to give them an edge with new functionality and deployment options for a seamless “total package” solution.
For years BASIS has touted the theme of “A Second Life for Legacy Software.” This was put to the test when a major end-user of BASIS technology faced the need to modernize their application to deliver on new process improvements. Sound familiar?
If you are a PRO/5® developer and would love to leverage all that the Eclipse IDE has to offer such as BASIS and third-party code management plug-ins, there is a new option for you. Try using Eclipse and the Business BASIC Development Toolkit (BDT) plug-in to edit your PRO/5 programs.
This is the follow-up article to Getting Started with BBJSP, in which we presented both what BBJSP is and how to use it to create content-driven web pages, and Contexts and BBJSP.
Have you ever wanted to leverage your BBx® knowledge to implement the Model-view-controller architecture to generate web pages? Now you can!
Have you ever wanted to have Google-like fast searches of your BBx data from your PRO/5® and BBj® applications? BBx’s new FULLTEXT indices, courtesy of the open source Apache Lucene project, is the solution.
Did you ever wish that PRO/5® could have the benefits of all the great new database features that come with the BASIS DBMS, like stored procedures, data replication, data change auditing, triggers, asynchronous triggers, the Google-like Lucene search engine, and more? Well, now PRO/5 can, and all without needing to change a line of code, and most likely without loss of performance.
U.S. labor productivity is tracked by the Department of Labor as an industry’s total output divided by the hours worked by its employees. As output rises relative to employee hours, productivity rises. At BASIS, the strategic direction has long been to provide you with tools to improve your development productivity. To that end, we have leveraged a simple but valuable Eclipse feature.
The Dashboard Utility, introduced in BBj 14.0, has been steadily growing more flexible and capable with each subsequent release thanks to your feedback of wishes. Developers, and even users can now do so much more!
Customers have been lining up for a BASIS partner’s mobile construction management solution employing BUI – BASIS’ browser user interface. EMQUE’s solution reduces paperwork, improves efficiency, while supporting a variety of mobile devices.
As business needs grow, it is vital that core enterprise applications and their required data access scale as well. BASIS took another huge step forward by providing this scaling in the area of concurrent read access to the data, all without any configuration or application changes!
Who wouldn’t want to save time by limiting the movement of paper, eliminating the filing of paper invoices, and eliminating manual check signing?
Replication is a powerful and easy-to-implement feature that every BASIS customer has reason to put to work. It provides an invaluable safety net that anyone would pay dearly for if the situation ever required it. Replication provides extra data security and peace of mind.
Legislation such as HIPPA and Sarbanes Oxley mandate that a company needs to monitor various data access and change operations from within a business application or implement data encryption. The ‘Change Audit Logging’ and ‘Data Access Trigger’ features built into the BASIS DBMS are great options to address these requirements without needing to change a single line of application code, or even changing interpreters.
One of the largest logging companies in Austria, BASIS customer DAM-EDV developed a smartphone delivery note app for drivers to use whenever they transport a load of logs.
Discover who has a file locked or a particular record extracted using some new simple methods.
Gain a few tips and tricks that BASIS engineers use daily in the Business BASIC Development Tools.
Use triggers to fire asynchronously on a target as a result of data changes to the source filesystem.
Create more powerful queries than ever before and link queries together, cascading them one to the other, or link queries to your own custom program.