6/28/2010

Brinks Bolivia saves 40% on developing the Web GUI for its Billing System

Brink Bolivia needed to track their services in order to send customers reliable invoices and to generate parameterized reports about the status of each service which is a key for administrative decision-making.

So the company decided to build a billing system that would allow access via the web according to user's roles and permissions so each user gets only the options relevant for them and should be connected with other modules of the main system and offer a user-friendly user interface.

For creating this application Brinks used Visual WebGui. "Our developers were able to find a new world of user-friendly tools and very comfortable for the web environment without having to worry about HTML, CSS or AJAX. It was very quick to create all the interfaces and also connect them with our database," said Alexander Cuellar, Applications Analyst Manager who added "custom tables helped us a lot displaying visual information to the user, which goes beyond just numbers, now the information is highlighted by colors, letters and positions within each screen."

You can read the full success story and take a look at the application's UI on visualwebgui.com

6/20/2010

Creating a fully scalable and redundant application with VWG version 6.4 on Vimeo

The webcast explores the ability to create a light weighted application, no matter how large or complex with unlimited scalability and redundancy support with VWG. It will explore the new tools and concepts which are making this capability possible.

Creating a fully scalable and redundant application with VWG version 6.4 on Vimeo

6/17/2010

Brinks Bolivia Customer Service System - the eSAC System allows registration and management of contacts for a customer and in addition to maintaining an updated status of each service or customer request, to have accurate information and perform the appropriate procedures for all applications.

The system was originally developed in VB6 and since web access was essential it was offered via Citrix. Since the application's performance was a critical issue as well as the need to offer the system without specific installations the company looked for a solution that would solve those drawbacks of using Citrix.

Searching for a solution that would allow it to offer the eSAC system over the web without the need for specific client installations and provide sufficient performance levels even when there is limited bandwidth lead Brinks to a decision to migrate their VB6 Customer Service system to the Visual WebGui Web/Cloud Platform.

"Developing on Visual WebGui we were able to migrate the system to web environment and even add new features in less time which allows us to offer it over a standard web browser with better performance and no installations as was required with Citrix," concluded Alexander Cuellar.

Go to the Visual WebGui website to read to full article >

6/13/2010

While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk.

Visual WebGui reinstates the power of the server to AJAX development and provides a statefull yet scalable, server centric architecture that provides the benefits and user productivity of AJAX with the security and developer productivity we had before AJAX stormed into our lives.

"When I first came up with the concept of Visual WebGui, I was frustrated by the fragile and complex nature of developing web applications. The contrast in productivity between working in a fully OOP compiled environment vs. scripting even today, with JQuery, Dojo and such, is still huge. Even today the greatest sponsor of JavaScript programming, Google, is offering a framework to avoid JavaScript using Java that compiles to JavaScript (GWT). So I decided to find a way to abstract the complexity or rather delegate the complex job to enable developers to concentrate on the “What” instead of the “How” and embraced the Form based approach," said Guy Peled the inventor of Visual WebGui.

Although traditional OOP development still rules the enterprise, the differences between web sites and web applications have blurred and so did the differences between classic developers and web developers. As a result, we now see declarative languages in desktop / backend development environments (WPF / WF) and we see OOP, gaining more and more power in web development (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET DOM). However, what has not changed is enterprise need for security, development ROI, reach, highly responsive and interactive UIs and scalability.

The advantages that declarative languages and 'on demand' compilation provide over classic development are mostly the flexibility and a more readable initialize component it offers which is what Gizmox is aspiring to do by replacing the designer initialize component with XAML code. The code in this new project template will be compiled on demand using the build provider mechanism ASP.NET has. This means that the performance hit is only on the first request and after that the performance is the same as a prebuilt solution. This will allow the flexibility of a dynamically updated sites and the power of fully blown enterprise applications over web. You can also use prebuilt features available in ASP.NET to enjoy both worlds in production.

VWG XAML implementation (VWG Sites) will be the first truly compliable XAML implementation as Microsoft implemented Silverlight and WPF as a runtime markup interpretation opposed to the ASP.NET markup implementation which is compiled to CLR code once. We have chosen to implement the VWG Sites parser as a different way to create CLR code that provides greater performance over the reflection alternative. VWG Sites will also be the first server side XAML UI engine which, while giving the power of XAML, it will not require any plug-ins or installations on the client side.

Here is a short video demonstrating VWG Sites markup.


There is also a live sample available here.

6/01/2010

Explore the new extended ListView and Win Prizes

Gizmox is announcing a ListView Challenge where developers can participate by creating and submitting their own implementations of the new extended ListView. "its quite amazing what you can do with it. It opens a lot of new ways to present data in a better and more userfriendly way," says one of the VWG community members who built a three level hierarchal ListView.

Watch the hierarchal ListView demo by Visualizer

Those ListView implementations will be reviewed and rated and the winner will win a free Professional Studio w/ 1 year subscription. The 5 top rated codes will entitle their developers for a cool new T-shirt.

The new v6.4 introduces new capabilities with its extended ListView Control. The Collapsible Panel enhancement of the ListView Control, along with the Column Type Control, open up the possibilities for potential usage of the ListView control for data display, data entry and as the Collapsible Panel can contain whatever control you like, it can as well contain other ListView controls, thus making it possible to create Hierarchial ListView display of unlimited number of levels.

The first enhancement is the introduction of a new column type Control which opens up the possibility for a ListView cell to contain controls like CheckBox, ComboBox, ListBox or even TabControl, Form or another ListView as the contents of that particular cell. This means that the ListView is no longer a display-only control, but has the full potential of being a full blown data entry control as well.

The second major enhancement is the introduction of ListViewPanelItem. The ListViewPanelItem behaves exactly the same as it‘s predecessor, the ListViewItem, and in additon it has a Panel Control attached to it, seperate panel for each row in the ListView. This new Panel can be either expanded (visible) or not (hidden) and when expanded, will fill the full width of the ListView, but has adjustable height.

Join the Challenge

Enter the Challenge