Servoy Blurs Line Between Web Apps, Desktop Apps - The Servoy Way: A Test Drive
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It is very easy to get started with Servoy 4.0: The installation is wizard-driven
and includes all of the components needed to get going. The installation wizard
automatically installs Eclipse and any other required elements. Setting up the
Servoy Application Server is equally easy, removing many of the obstacles that
developers usually encounter when configuring a Web application environment for
testing and deployment of applications.
Launching Servoy Developer brings up a screen filled with useful tidbits, ranging
from direct links to flash-based tutorials to background information on the
Eclipse development environment. The introduction screen is divided up into
areas that support new Servoy users, users new to Eclipse and users who are familiar
with previous versions of Servoy.
The product does an excellent job of unobtrusively guiding the user—tool tips,
guided wizards and context-sensitive help is all readily available. Most
projects will start with the solution checkout dialog, which points the user
toward new or previously generated projects.
Servoy uses the term "solution" to refer to development projects. All
projects are started by either opening an existing solution or creating a new
solution. Servoy is designed to work with SQL databases from many different
vendors, and in most cases it is best to have the SQL database predefined and
operating before starting a Servoy solution.
Most everything takes place in the Eclipse environment and is form-based.
Developers design forms that interact with the SQL database to process data. Of
course, the forms can contain procedures, calculations, data verification and
many other event-driven elements; the real key here is that all of those
processes can be accomplished without writing a single lick of code.
How an application is laid out is completely up to the developer. Menus can be
designed into forms to select form-based procedures, developers can use a tab-based
interface to drive data entry and fields can be populated on forms to be used as
lookups to tables. The flexibility and freedom is a great accomplishment for a
product that requires no hand-written code, but there is a down side.
Developers not well versed in UI designing can create poorly designed forms
that only confuse an end user. With Servoy it becomes readily apparent that the
old management axiom of "One hour of planning can save 7 hours of
labor" holds true. In other words, only seasoned developers that have a
good sense of interface design should be let loose with the product, which is
pretty much true of any flexible RAD
product.
Once a developer is fully familiar with the Eclipse/Servoy environment,
applications can be generated very quickly. The drag-and-drop form population,
along with predefined scripts, can reduce development time greatly when fully
leveraged, according to the company. Servoy has done case studies in which a
team of developers was able to slash man-hours tenfold when compared to a .Net
project.
