brainstorm: January 2016

Thursday, January 21, 2016

NextReports Server: See your refresh time

Any widget inside a NextReports Server dashboard can have a refresh time. By default this is zero and no refresh is done. If it is set to a bigger value, then after the specified number of seconds the widget is auto refreshed.

Sometimes, if a dashboard has many widgets, you may want to find which of them have a refresh > 0. From version 9.0 this will be easily possible because widget's header will contain the actual refresh time if any:

The time is nicely show in hours, minutes and seconds (if any):

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

NextReports 9: A New Header Menu

Before NextReports 9 a Tab Menu was used to show all the features. Because this was not scalable and increasing number of tabs made the application UI looked a bit ugly when a tab or more were falling to next row, NextReports 9 will use a new header menu which will contain all the sections.

By default more space can be used by server UI because there are no tabs anymore:

When user clicks the menu button from top left, the menu will slide from left to right showing available sections:

Actions from top right like 'Change password' and 'Log out' where grouped to a top right actions menu:

About Me

Mihai Dinca-Panaitescu

Working with Java since 1998 with focus on both server back-end and UI.

In the late 90's till 2003 when not so much frameworks were present I was involved in proprietary server implementation (with all the technology from that time like RMI, JDBC, transactions, Servlets, XML, XSL), user interface with SWING and a lot of algorithms for agriculture business.

In middle 2000's I was involved in many custom development projects adding more flavor to my knowledge : JBoss and OC4J servers, J2EE, Hibernate, EHCache, Ant, JUnit, TestNG

From 2008 I was part of NextReports, starting with designer development in SWING. Then NextReports Server came to life and new technologies were adopted : Spring, JPA, JCR, Wicket, jQuery, Jersey, Maven, Ivy, Git, Android.

Since starting of 2014 I developed a HTML5 library called NextCharts which can be found on github.

I’m currently part of the NextReports developing team at Advantage Software Factory, a local leading provider of business software solutions. NextReports is a business reporting suite composed of reports designer, reporting engine and reporting server. Besides this product, ASF also developed a debt collection software and a CRM solution.