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Announcement: The Community Blog Has a New Home

Published April 10, 2017 by Cate

After four years and almost 200 posts, the Appway Community Blog is moving house!

With a crisp new design, the Blog is part of the first release of the dedicated "Community" section on community.appway.com. It joins the Partner Directory announced last week, and will continue to be developed as part of the transition to the new home of the Appway Community.

The Developer Blog (as it was then called) was launched almost exactly four years ago today, on April 9, 2013. The first major announcement was the release of Appway 5.3, which introduced (among other things), the ability to convert Placeholder components into Screens and Subprocesses by right-clicking, and a "paused" state for process instances.

Since then, the Blog has covered the introduction of Appway Certification and Academy e-Learning, provided productivity tips and tricks for working in the Studio, and hosted a series of posts on security and design.

We also shared some of the fantastic content from Appway Sphere 2016, looking at ways to improve Screen performance, topics surrounding authentication and authorization in Appway, and housekeeping for your Appway solution.

The Community Blog will continue sharing Community news and events from our new home, as well as posts written by expert Appway staff on UX, security, performance and optimization topics. You can find patch and full release notes and announcements on our Support News channel, along with other relevant product-specific updates.

What do you want to see us cover in the Community Blog? Would you like to contribute?

Send your ideas to Cate and Alex at community@appway.com!

Developer Blog... over and out.
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Image courtesy Phillip Capper / Flickr

Appway Ecosystem: Meet Our Partners!

Published April 3, 2017 by Cate

System Installation

System Maintenance

Application Design

The number of developers creating great solutions with Appway grows every day, something we're really proud of. We couldn't do this alone — we work with partner companies to ensure our customers can achieve their goals.

As we continue building a transparent ecosystem where information is shared, we're pleased to announce that you can now explore our Partner Directory. Available on community.appway.com, the Directory provides an overview of the services provided by each partner, as well as the industries and countries they serve. You can also see how many Appway-certified employees each company has.

Our partners fall into three main groups, providing consulting, implementation and technology services.

Looking for a company to lead your digital initiative based on Appway technology? Our Consulting Partners look forward to working with you!

Perhaps you'd like support in implementing, maintaining, or further developing your solution? Then our Implementation Partners are ready to assist. In fact, nine out of ten Appway implementations are done together with such partners.

Finally, our Technology Partners complement our products and solutions with cutting-edge technology, from image processing and electronic signatures, to due diligence and ID verification services.

Visit the Partner Directory to discover more!

An Introduction to Digital Signatures

Published March 27, 2017 by Brett Crawley

Authentication

What are digital signatures and what do they tell us? For legal reasons, digital documents sometimes require a digital signature to verify that the content of the document was created by a verifiable source, and that the content itself hasn't been changed or altered.

I'm not talking about a signature written with a stylus on a device, or an e-signature. What I am talking about relates to digital certificates from a trusted authority; an authority that has taken the time to verify your identity via physical means. A digital signature is a type of electronic signature "that encrypts documents with digital codes that are particularly difficult to duplicate".

Signatures and Hashes
A digital signature is, in essence, an encrypted hash of the content of a document.

A hash is a mathematical algorithm that converts an arbitrary amount of data into a fixed-length identifier. This algorithm is a one-way process: You can always calculate a hash from a document, but you cannot calculate the document's content from the hash.

The hash for a document does not change until the document is altered. Once a change is made to the document, the hash changes as well. The hash therefore indicates whether a document has remained unchanged since being signed.

We have established how we can determine whether a document has remained unchanged since it was signed. But how do we know who signed the document? This is where encryption and certificate authorities come in.

Encryption
To digitally sign a document, you need a certificate from a Certificate Authority, and the private and public keys associated with that certificate. Before issuing certificates, Certificate Authorities carry out certain checks on the companies or individuals that have requested the certificates. Example bodies include Verisign, Thawte, and Digicert (and there are also many more). The Certificate Authority will require physical evidence of your identity, and may also record biometric information as part of the certificate.

The private key provided with the certificate must be kept secret, safe and secure: It is your key for opening files encrypted specifically for you, and also for you to sign documents with.

Once the document has been hashed and signed, we now know a) that the document hasn't been changed since signing, and b) the identity of the person who signed the document. How can this be verified? By hashing the document ourselves, and comparing this to the hash of the document retrieved when by decrypting the signature using the signer's public key.

Let's take the example of Maria and her apartment. Maria signs an agreement to sell her apartment using her private key. The buyer receives the document, along with a copy of Maria's public key. If the public key can't decrypt the signature, it means the signature isn't Maria's. The signature is then considered invalid.

Here, the issue with the signature does not indicate that the document has been changed, just that the signature is not Maria's. To verify if the document has been changed, the buyer would need to hash the document, and then check whether this hash, and the hash in the signature, match.

One thing that has not yet been established is when our document was signed. This is where timestamps come into play.

Timestamps and TSAs
A timestamp in this context is a date and time displayed in GeneralizedTime format, an ASN.1 standard. This standard specifies that the date should be formatted using the following mask: YYYYMMDDHHMMSSZ.

Using this format, May 1, 2016 at (precisely) 10 am GMT would be "20160501100000Z".

These timestamps are generated by a Time Stamping Authority (TSA). A TSA is an organization that is recognized to be a trusted third party, and can issue a timestamp which can be applied to a signature.

The hash of the signature (not the hash of the document) is provided to the TSA. Because a signature is a piece of content, it can be passed as input data for a hashing algorithm. The TSA concatenates the hash of the signature with a timestamp; the TSA then hashes this concatenated string. Next, the TSA concatenates the resulting hash with the timestamp. Finally, the TSA encrypts the result of this concatenation with that TSA's private key. The result, a "signature of your signature", is sent back, and stored along with the original signature.

Having gone through these steps, we now have an integrity check for the document; the identity of the signer; and proof of when the signature occurred. At this point we have what is known as a "non-repudiatable document", that is, a document for which an individual or entity cannot deny having performed a particular action.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.31

Published March 22, 2017 by Marghe

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.2.31 patch release.

Behind the Scenes at community.appway.com

Published March 20, 2017 by Alex Cahiz

We have been working hard on upgrading our support and interaction space for Appway users. We've built a new solution for the Appway Community, over at community.appway.com. Have you explored it yet?

A clean UI, improved performance, and more information and communication about our products are three examples of how we're bringing the platform to the next level. As the transition from developer.appway.com to the Community site continues over the course of 2017, we're taking the opportunity to share an update on the progress made so far.

The new Community platform is a collaborative effort between the Customer Success, Product, and Professional Services teams at Appway. A small dedicated team of developers work in two-week sprints to bring new features, refine existing functionality, and incrementally add value for you, our users. Deployments take place approximately every month, and you can follow what we've been up to in our Community Release Notes.

We would also love to get your feedback on what you think! Send any ideas or comments to community@appway.com

Support News

Have you seen our Support News section on Community? Support News is our channel dedicated to release notes and communications specifically related to support. Stay up to date with news on Appway 7 – we posted about Feature Removal and Deprecation Planned with Appway 7.0 earlier last month – as well as the latest patch releases.

Coming soon, you'll be able to get Support News updates delivered directly to your inbox. You can already subscribe by going to your profile settings, and checking the box for Support News. If you decide these updates are not for you, you can always unsubscribe at a later date.

Knowledge Base

A large part of the migration to Community involves improvements to our Knowledge Base, the home of our product documentation and content. So far, we've updated the UI for better readability, tried to minimize the use of pesky HTML tables (we can't get rid of them all!), corrected typos, and worked on improved navigation. We believe that these changes will allow you to help you find the topics and materials you need even faster.

We took the decision to only migrate content for Appway 6.3 and above. If you're using Appway version 6.2 or lower, developer.appway.com will remain your go-to source for technical Appway content.

Support Integration with JIRA

Our Support Ticketing system was one of the first sections to be upgraded and migrated to Community. We’ve streamlined the design, built in more tools for organization and tracking, and aimed to improve process transparency. Listening to feedback provided internally, we found that a repeated "ask" was for integrating our Support Tickets with JIRA (which our Product team uses to track development). So last sprint, the team implemented this functionality – and thanks to the positive response at the sprint review, it should be deployed to production soon. We think it's a step in the right direction in improving transparency between the Product team and users submitting tickets.

We hope that our efforts really improve your overall experience with the Appway Community. As always, we really appreciate your feedback and comments as they help steer our efforts towards building a platform that serves you best. Reach out to community@appway.com with any thoughts, suggestions or questions you may have!

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Image courtesy of Pixabay / licensed under CC0

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.21

Published March 9, 2017 by Marghe

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.3.21 patch release.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.30

Published March 9, 2017 by Marghe

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.2.30 patch release.

Call for Contributions: Share Your Knowledge!

Published March 6, 2017 by Cate

The Appway Cookbook is a crowd-sourced treasure-trove of knowledge, containing over 260 recipes filled with useful tips, tricks and guidance. Recipes cover a wide range of themes, from choosing which Screen components best fit your use case, to script functions, to solution performance. What have you discovered you can do with Appway? We'd love to hear about it!

Everyone is encouraged to write and share their own recipes — community member Mattia recently added his own contribution to the Cookbook about file uploads and screen positioning. It's proved to be a popular recipe, with over 600 views already. Thanks, Mattia!

One of our Academy trainers, Ciarán, decided to take feedback from training attendees and turn it into a great recipe. He was being asked questions about solution performance, and how to measure it, on a regular basis. So he put together a super-detailed article covering the five major ways to measure solution performance.

Our recipe on creating a database instance on Amazon Web Services was created by Roberto — a member of Appway's Product Team — within his first 90 days of working with Appway. He saw a gap in our content that he could fill, and took the initiative to share his know-how with us.

Recipes are a great way of sharing what you've learnt while working with Appway, and give other members of the Appway Community a taste of what can be done. Our Community Team can help you draft and edit your contribution... but we need your ideas!

Simply sign in to get started:

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Image courtesy Paul D'Ambra / Flickr

"Benvenuti" to our new Academy Center!

Published February 27, 2017 by n/A

Specially-designed course materials, practical hands-on exercises and purpose-built facilities combine to provide a first-class Appway experience at our new Academy Center in Chiasso, Switzerland.

Appway's new Academy Center

Housed in the same building as Appway's Ticino-based engineering and services departments, attendees have the chance to network with our knowledgeable staff, and experience the region's warmth and hospitality.

The very first training session to take place in the brand-new Academy Center is Fundamental Training, from March 7–9, 2017, followed by Business Analyst training on March 10. Take a look at the Academy Calendar (PDF) for dates of all upcoming training.

Academy Lead, Nives Škunca, says, "What I like most about the new facility is that you can learn about Appway in our new training room, equipped with high-tech teaching tools, and you're also in close proximity to the R&D and Professional Service Appbirds. Don’t miss the opportunity!”

Chiasso is just over 10 minutes' drive from beautiful Lake Como in Italy – and from authentic Italian pizza and gelato! With the opening of the Gotthard Base Tunnel (the world's longest and deepest rail tunnel) in late 2016, travel from northern and central Switzerland is now even faster.

View of Como

More information about the various trainings and services offered by Appway Academy is available in the Academy Catalogue (PDF).

If you have any questions about the new Academy Center, please contact academy@appway.com. We look forward to welcoming you!
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Image of Como via Gabriele Asnaghi / Flickr

Supporting Native Languages in Appway

Published February 20, 2017 by Alex Cahiz

Labels

Languages

February 21st is International Mother Tongue Day, a global effort to support all languages worldwide. Businesses with global ambitions need multi-language support to provide better experiences to local markets. Appway provides a simple framework to support this: Labels.

There are over 6500 languages and dialects used daily across the world. No matter where you are building your solution, if your goal is to support multiple markets, one feature of better customer experience is localization. While user expectations differ depending on the industry and the user's country of origin, overall, supporting a user's native language [PDF] has a positive impact on customer experience and loyalty.

Appway provides support for a complete multi-language framework based on language labels. Labels are used to translate text shown in the Portal into different languages supported by your solution. Instead of entering text into your Screens, enter the relevant text as Labels. You can then enter the translation of this text in different languages, without having to manually create multiple, language-specific Screens. Labels are translated to the user's language on the fly.

How does Appway know which language to display in the UI? Appway uses a multi-level strategy to determine users' language preferences. It considers all possible language configuration possibilities, starting with HTTP Query parameters and Session Attributes, through to Cookies and persistent user-based and system-based configurations.

As an example, the text in a Screen may read, "First name" and "Last name". If this text has been created using Labels, a user with the language preference set to English still sees, "First name" and "Last name". But if the language preference of the user is set to German, the same text is then displayed as "Vorname" and "Nachname", if a German translation has been provided for the Labels.

Our "Language Priorities" article contains more information about how Appway determines which language is displayed in users' web browsers. "Languages and Labels" goes into more details about Labels.

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Image courtesy of Pixabay / licensed under CC0

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.20

Published February 8, 2017 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.3.20 patch release.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.29

Published February 8, 2017 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.2.29 patch release.

Plan for the Future by Designing for Change

Published February 6, 2017 by Alex Cahiz

Application Design

Business Objects

Appway is a dynamic platform that you can adapt to your requirements and context. This week's blog, a recording from Appway Sphere 2016, proposes that you design your solution with change in mind. By addressing things at design time, you can minimize disruption and avoid confusion.

Martin Spengler, Domain Lead for Work Automation, and Solution Engineers Lead Mauro Labate elaborate on what "Design for Change" means. They cover Appway's Business Object runtime versioning system, and discuss the challenges that come with changing a running solution. Based on their experience with a variety of client projects, Mauro and Martin share strategies and techniques you can use to help plan for the future.

Watch the whole presentation, or navigate to the sections that most interest you, using our interactive table of contents:

1. Introduction

What is "Design for Change" and why does it matter? (00:46)
Appway’s Runtime Versioning System (02:36)
Appway Business Object Lifecycle (04:19)

2. Strategies & Techniques (09:09)

3. Deep Dive & Recipes

Deep Dive #1: Force the New Version (10:55)
Process Changes: Is it safe to modify activities in a process model? (15:58)
Data Changes: Is it safe to modify variable definitions? (26:42)
Batch Programs, Process Instances & Process Tokens (43:34)
Design for Change Practices: What actions can be done to mitigate the process migration tasks? (48:21)
Deep Dive #2: Keep the Process Model Fixed (56:06)

4. Discussion & Conclusion (1:05:12)

For further information on some of the topics from this presentation, see:

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Image courtesy SSP / licensed under CC0

Tickets, Tokens and Authentication: An Introduction to Kerberos

Published January 30, 2017 by Brett Crawley

Single sign-on (SSO) mechanisms are advantageous in that they avoid users having to continually enter their credentials to access other network resources. Users don't have to remember multiple passwords, and passwords do not have to be passed across the network. The risk of passwords being captured or stolen is therefore significantly reduced.

Appway is often used in conjunction with SSO, so this week's blog dives deeper into Kerberos, one of the SSO mechanisms available. The benefits of single sign-on aren't limited to a user accessing Appway, either. The same principle can also be applied to Appway accessing other resources on behalf of the end user.

Kerberos – A Ticket-based Security Protocol
Kerberos is an authentication mechanism which involves three parties, its name inspired by the mythical creature with three heads. Authentication is the act of verifying that you are who you claim to be by checking your login credentials. This differs from authorization, which is the act of verifying that you have sufficient rights to access the system. Kerberos is not used for authorization. For authorization, the application server relies on Active Directory (or some other directory system), accessed via Kerberos.

Kerberos is a ticket-based security protocol. This means that users retrieve a ticket/token from their network server, and that ticket is then passed to a network resource that they want to access. That resource needs to operate within a certain realm. A "realm" in Kerberos terms is equivalent to a domain in Windows. The realm name is, by convention, the DNS domain name but in upper case letters. As an example, "mydomain.com" is the DNS domain name, while "MYDOMAIN.COM" is the realm name.

How does Kerberos work?
A user logs in to their computer, and a token is issued by a Key Distribution Center (KDC) transparently (that is, without any user intervention). The KDC is responsible for verifying a user's credentials and issuing them with Kerberos tokens. In the case of Windows, for example, the KDC is the domain controller.

Once issued, the token is stored on that user's computer, in a local cache associated with that user. When the user wants to access another system, the Kerberos token ("token" and "ticket" can be user interchangeably) is used to authenticate the user. The system then verifies the token with the KDC.

The diagram below shows a scenario where everything works as expected, with the user having sufficient access rights for the specific system.

Here's a more detailed explanation of the steps:

The user logs in to their computer
The KDC returns a Kerberos token to the user's computer
The user requests a resource from the web application server
The web application server asks the user's computer to authenticate with the Kerberos protocol. This arrow is colored red in the diagram because it is actually a refusal of access, along with a request for the user to provide their credentials.
The user's computer then resends their request, and includes the Kerberos token in the headers
The application server asks for verification of the token from the KDC
The KDC sends its verification response to the application server
Once the user's identity has been verified, the application server then asks the LDAP server (usually Active Directory for Windows) what roles the user has
The LDAP server responds with a list of the roles for that user (or an empty list if a user does not have any roles)
The application server then responds with the resource requested by the user (if the user's identity was verified correctly, and the user has the right roles to access the resource)

Steps 1–7 cover the process of authentication. If verification is unsuccessful in step 7, the application server returns an HTTP status of 401: An "Unauthorized" error, informing the user that authentication failed.

Steps 8–10 cover the process of authorization. If authorization is unsuccessful in step 9, the application server returns an HTTP status of 403: A "Forbidden" error, informing the user that they do not have the rights to access the resource.

Let's take a more detailed look, using a sequence diagram of the interactions:

We've now covered the basic sequence of events. Let's dive into the concepts of service principals and delegation, looking at how the application server authenticates itself, and how it can be used to call services on behalf of an end user.

Service Principals
The application server has a user associated with it, known as the "service principal". The service principal exists so that the application server can authenticate itself with both the KDC and with the LDAP server when verifying the tokens and retrieving user information. To authenticate as the service principal, the application server uses a keytab file in the Kerberos Keytab binary file format [link opens a .txt file]. The keytab file is a table of key entries, and can contain multiple entries (although it usually only contains one).

A service principal looks like this: HTTP/myhost.mydomain.com@MYDOMAIN.COM

The service principal represents a union of the protocol and the hostname. The hostname may be in its short form or fully qualified (e.g. myhost or myhost.mydomain.com), and may or may not include an @ symbol followed by the realm name.

There may be multiple service principal names (SPNs) associated with a service principal. These SPNs behave as aliases for the service principal. You may have an SPN for the short name and an SPN for the long name of a host, and further SPNs because the IP address resolves to a different hostname in the reverse DNS lookup. If you are using a clustered solution, you may have SPNs for each node, and for the load balancer.

The SPNs are also used as a means to find the application server's record in LDAP.

A rule of thumb here is that if a reverse DNS lookup can resolve to it, it should be an alias, that is, an SPN. Generally speaking, a server can be referenced by its shortname/hostname with or without the REALM name. A server can also be referenced with its fully qualified name that includes the domain with or without the REALM. There should be an SPN for each of these variants for each of the protocols you wish to use.

Let's take a look at the diagram below. I'm using HTTP as the protocol; for one machine a shortname/hostname of node1; a domain name of mydomain.com; and a REALM of MYDOMAIN.COM.

This diagram also shows how you would setup the technical user for a loadbalanced multinode cluster.

User Impersonation / Delegation
A web application can be configured to be able to call other services on behalf of an end user. This is known as user impersonation or delegation (the two terms can be used interchangeably).

To allow delegation, the service principal must have delegation rights activated in LDAP/Active Directory.

The user principal of the logged-in user (that is, their session) contains something called a GSSCredential. A GSSCredential is a container from the low level libraries that enable Kerberos in Java. It is this credential that contains the user's Kerberos token.

The application server can request a special type of token to wrap this user's token when making requests on the user's behalf. This special token is called a Ticket Granting Server (TGS) ticket. Once the application server has this special token and has encapsulated the user's token within it, the application server can then make a service call as this user. The service being requested checks the validity of the token with the KDC in much the same way as the app server did when the user requested a resource from it the first time.

The sequence diagram for this can be seen here:

Conclusion
So why should you use Kerberos? Kerberos is secure and makes users' life simpler.

Kerberos is one of the most secure authentication mechanisms, and it works with both Windows and Unix-based systems, including Mac. After initial login to the user's network connection computer, all interaction with other network resources are carried out without user interaction. The protocol has encryption built in, so doesn’t require that communication is carried out over SSL to be secure. Applications that have been granted the delegation right can interact on the user's behalf with third party systems to retrieve their data.

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Image of Cerberus courtesy Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0

Experience Optimization in Appway

Published January 23, 2017 by Alex Cahiz

There's a substantial amount of material available on developer.appway.com that talks about visual design, interfaces, and user experience (UX). These concepts form part of a larger, all-encompassing concept: "customer experience", referred to as "CX".

As businesses evolve, success depends on the interplay of the various disciplines within CX for the benefit of the customer. A unified vision needs to emerge that covers the breadth of the interactions end-to-end, for both customers and employees.

This post focuses on UX topics which contribute to great CX: consistency, customization, collaboration and cross-platform design.

Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.
Humans respond well to clearly-defined patterns of behavior. If you push a button to call an elevator, you have certain expectations: The button provides feedback by lighting up to let you know something is happening; the elevator arrives and opens its doors.

Much more complex situations can also be designed to follow defined patterns. When designing a solution in Appway, use the components and screen layout to set expectations in a consistent way.

Be consistent in the type of Screen you use: use Form Screens for forms, for example. We found certain generic screen types that are used again and again in applications, and designed Appway components that implement these specific screen types in a well-defined, high-level way. Using these Screens in a consistent (and correct!) manner again sets expectations as to how to interact with the application.

Processes can be built to follow certain consistent patterns as well. If we take a look at what happens when a user reaches the last step of a Process, we see that the default user experience can be quite abrupt. In the example below, the user submits the process for approval by another user — and is just sent back to the portal, without any acknowledgment that the approval submission was successful.

Our End of Process recipe highlights the importance of giving users visual confirmation of the end of a process. Providing consistent process behavior to your users helps users determine if the process completed correctly, or if there is a bug. A confirmation screen also helps guide users back to the previous screen in the event they need to undo an action.

Customization
Building in elements that allow solutions to be tailored to customers is a cornerstone of CX design.

Customization can be simply tweaking a few visual elements to adapt to specific brand guidelines. It can also be reworking processes to better fit with a specific business environment. In this post I'm just going to focus on visual customization.

Our Adapting the Appway Workspace to a Corporate Design recipe covers the various ways in which the Appway Workspace can be visually customized. From company fonts to color schemes, find out how to adapt the Workspace to fit the look and branding of your company.

As solutions become more complex and customized, speed and performance also become increasingly important considerations. An understanding of the Appway Screen lifecycle can help you optimize the efficiency of your Screens. We’ve put together a great recipe, Improving Appway Screen Performance, that highlights various techniques to keep browser performance snappy, and user experience strong.

Collaboration
Designing more personal interactions between customers, users and your business is another side of building excellent CX. One aspect of this could be conversational interfaces within the Workspace.

The Workspace Collaboration module allows for quick collaboration and handoff between users. Real-time collaboration can help improve efficiency, providing users with real-time responses from colleagues specialized in specific subjects.

Conversational interfaces could also be integrated with customer-facing pages, using chatbots. Chatbots provide the impression of one-to-one interaction, and prompt the customer with the right data point requests until the interaction is complete, or handover to a human is necessary. This is a type of interactive design that benefits employees and customers as it funnels out requests that can be solved through an automated interaction tree.

Find out more in our webinar on harnessing the power of chatbots in the banking and financial services industry.

Cross-Platform Design

The world has gone mobile. Many industries, if not most, have worked tirelessly to tailor solutions to this market. This has unfortunately created a fractured economy of half-baked mobile applications that are rarely as powerful or full-featured as their web- or desktop-based counterparts. A "mobile-first" approach means less focus on creating a seamless experience that delivers regardless of the user's device.

Appway does not subscribe to a mobile-first philosophy, which our "Don't Design per Device" blog post makes clear. The Appway Workspace does not detect specific devices; it works with all devices that support HTML standards, past, present, and future. Cross-platform design encourages you to prioritize user experience over mobile funnel vision.

Having said that, there are certain things you need to specifically consider for mobile users. Our recipe, Optimizing Appway Solutions for Mobile Devices, helps you optimize the mobile experience for your users.

The ideas and practices surrounding the wider topic of Customer Experience go beyond these examples. Check out our white paper on the subject, Master Customer Experience Excellence, to learn about the competitive advantage of truly unifying digital and real-world processes.

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Cloud/technology image courtesy Ed Gregory / CC0

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.19

Published January 11, 2017 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.3.19 patch release.

New Year's Resolutions for Solutions

Published January 9, 2017 by Cate

System Maintenance

Testing

January is a traditional time of year in the Western hemisphere to make resolutions for the months ahead — it's a time to reflect and identify new opportunities. Do you want to try something new, or improve something already existing? With these "New Year's Resolutions" for your Appway solution, you can do both.

1. Do Some Housekeeping on Your Solution
The amount of data generated and managed by an Appway platform grows year on year. Most of this data is loaded in memory — which, over time, can affect the performance and stability of your system. To ensure that your system continues to perform well it's important to follow some good practices in terms of process design and maintenance.

Solution Engineer Jean Jacques Bodo covered the various ways you can keep your solution running smoothly in his presentation at Appway Sphere 2016. He talks about how to handle unused business objects and suspended process instances, as well as logging, maintenance jobs and eviction policies.

2. Start Load Testing Your Solution
If you don't yet do this — consider it for 2017! Load testing is an investment in terms of time and effort that pays off in the long term.

The goal of load testing is to verify whether the system can sustain the estimated load of a specific number of users performing a specific number of tasks in a given period of time. It helps you determine whether your infrastructure is large enough, and measure how many users can be handled before the system is overloaded.

As a consequence of running load tests, you are better able to identify issues with the solution design, and discover bottlenecks or other issues relating to the infrastructure.

If you'd like support in setting up and running load tests on your solution, contact our Solution Engineering team to find out more.

3. Adhere to Naming Conventions
Make sure you're adhering to naming conventions throughout your solution.

The name you choose to give something can have an impact on your solution, and how your team works with your solution. If the names of Business Objects are not particularly clear, and don't follow a naming convention, it can quickly get confusing.

Our recipe on naming conventions provides a very quick overview of the different conventions you may want to adopt.

These are just three suggestions that can help make your solution more efficient. We'll continue posting helpful tips, advice and guidance throughout the year, so make sure to check the blog regularly!

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Image courtesy Nikki Buitendijk / Flickr

Welcome 2017 from Appway!

Published January 2, 2017 by Alex Cahiz

Wherever you are in the world, we at Appway Community want to wish you all a happy new year!

Last year saw changes within the Community, not least the announcement of the new Appway Community platform at Appway Sphere 2016. We have continued to work hard to realize this vision. Community is a major upgrade from the current Developer site that provides you with better means for collaboration and learning.

For those of you who attended Appway Sphere in September, we really appreciated getting to meet you, and hear your thoughts and needs regarding the Appway Community. Your feedback really does count in making your experience better.

We have quite a few ideas, features and projects in the works for next year and look forward to sharing them with you!

Please be sure come back regularly as we continue to bring you valuable content and other updates. We hope you are as excited as we are for 2017 and all the big updates that are coming with it from Appway. Cheers from Cate and Alex, your Appway Community team!

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Image courtesy Mike Bitzenhofer / Flickr

Community Round-up: The Best of 2016

Published December 19, 2016 by Cate

From creating recipes in our Cookbook, to discussing issues in the Forum, to getting in touch to share your ideas and feedback – thank you for contributing! We had an exciting year of big releases, announcements and growth and we'd like to share some of the highlights with you.

Launching Appway Community
The major highlight for us this year was of course the launch of the new Appway Community! Have you visited community.appway.com yet? It's our new one-stop-shop for support, news, learning and collaboration.

We’re completely revamping the community experience, improving our knowledge base, tools and services. The transition from our legacy platform, developer.appway.com, is ongoing – so far, we have migrated Support Ticketing and the Support Forum. More features and functionality will be added soon as we continue creating benefits for the Appway ecosystem.

We've already had some great feedback on how our users expect the Community to grow – through events, more targeted content and interaction – and are looking forward to building on your ideas. If you'd like to get in touch, details are at the end of this post.

Events and Releases
This year saw two big moments for the Appway platform. In March, we launched version 6.3 which brought a number of improvements and requested features to the table. Some of the biggest highlights from the release included the Business Object Diff Viewer, a new feature that greatly enhances the capabilities of a development team when performing parallel work. We also added Error Guidance Screens to provide you with improved information in case something unexpected happens in your solution.

In September we pulled back the curtain at Appway Sphere to reveal some of what the future holds for Appway 7 and beyond. The announcement of Packages was warmly received by the community members we spoke to. In case you missed it, Packages are a new approach to structuring large solutions. You can find out more by watching Christian Estler explain Packages in detail.

The Inbox is another facet of Appway 7 that was showcased at Appway Sphere. Working with Inbox speeds up development, and introduces the power of the new unified data layer. Watch Aurelian Briner’s talk and live demo of the Inbox.

Appway is part of the future of digital interaction with the introduction of chat-based conversational interfaces. This feature will work natively within Appway, and be expanded into the third-party realm with Facebook messenger and more. Watch Appway CEO Hans Peter Wolf unveil this powerful new toolset.

As if all these great features weren't enough, you can also look forward to a new design system as part of Appway 7. Senior User Experience Consultant Adriana Ispas took to the stage at Appway Sphere to present the evolution of the Appway Workspace (and what was learned along the way!), taking a look under the hood of Layout Managers and a providing a glimpse of the new design patterns coming with Appway 7.

Top Content
Looking back over the year, we wanted to highlight some of our most popular posts. Our Workspace Design Notes, covering design and development decisions for the Appway platform, were expanded with posts on why you shouldn't play hide and seek with your users and why it's really not a good idea to design for a specific device. The most popular Workspace Design Note, however, was about why there’s almost no drag-and-drop in Appway. The whole series is available to download as a PDF.

We also ran a two-part series in which we explained the importance of SSL. Part 1 covered what SSL does and why you'd want to use it and Part 2 looked at Certificate Authorities and server authentication.

If you're using Appway 6.3, you'll perhaps have met the little bird that appears on certain screens: Appbird. Do you know where the bird originates from?

Other popular content published this year included a deep-dive into screen performance optimization, as well as a detailed outline of export and deployment procedures. And when it comes to speed and efficiency, our guide to shortcut keys in Business Object Editors is incredibly useful!

Appway e-Learning & Certification
Alongside providing high-quality classroom and remote training, the Academy team has launched the latest way to learn all about Appway: e-Learning! Appway Fundamental training can now be taken online, whenever and wherever suits you best. Developer and Administrator training will follow in 2017. Visit e-Learning.appway.com for a free trial.

Once you’ve completed our training sessions, why not gain recognition for your skills by getting certified with Appway? Certification is even bundled together with e-Learning for an even more cost-effective approach. Read our Certification blog post to find out more!

Talk to Us
We've heard from many people throughout the year, and it was a pleasure to meet quite a few of you in person at Appway Sphere!

The key to building any healthy relationship is communication. Your feedback helps us improve your own experience and the experience of future Appway developers. Let us know your thoughts, ideas and concerns. Contact your Community team, Cate and Alex, anytime via community@appway.com

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.18

Published December 14, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.3.18 patch release.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.28

Published December 14, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.2.28 patch release.

Keep Solutions Running Smoothly with Housekeeping Best Practices

Published December 12, 2016 by Alex Cahiz

Application Design

Process Design

System Maintenance

The third installment in our series of presentations from Appway Sphere 2016 is Jean Jacques Bodo's talk on "Housekeeping Best Practices". Jean Jacques, one of our Solution Engineers, covers a set of best practices to follow so that your Appway solution runs smoothly from day one – and for years to come.

The presentation is divided into two key areas: design and eviction. The first part of the video introduces good practice to follow when designing your solution. The second part covers eviction policies in Appway, and which configurations to apply.

Here's an interactive table of contents that links directly to the section of the video described below:

1. Introduction (1:44)
2. Solution Design

Portal Process (3:40)
Main Process Design (6:46)
Cluster Files (10:40)
Chat Messages (13:45)

3. Administrative Activities

Obliteration (15:38)
Unused Business Objects (21:25)
Suspended Process Instances (22:33)
Logging (23:42)
BAM Data & Other Data Archives (28:07)
Maintenance Jobs (30:09)

4. Eviction Policies (31:41)

If you find this interesting and relevant stay tuned for a related recipe being published in the coming weeks.

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Image (cropped) courtesy Ali Bindawood / Flickr (CC-BY-ND 2.0)

Learning the Secrets Behind Authentication & Authorization

Published December 5, 2016 by Alex Cahiz

Continuing with our latest video series we present "JAAS & the Secrets Behind Authentication and Authorization in Appway" as presented by Mauro Labate at Appway Sphere 2016.

This presentation introduces the authentication flow used in a typical Appway project, highlighting the connection to the Java Authentication and Authorization Service. Later, the presentation focuses on Appway Users’ profiles, explaining what they are and how they are synchronized with a backend system (LDAP or custom).

Here's an interactive table of contents that links directly to the section of the video described below:

1. The Authentication & Authorization Flow (1:25)

Architecture and Principles: Components and implications (1:27)
The Flow (1) - Anonymous Request (6:48)
Web.XML – Security Roles & Constraints (7:43)
The Flow (2) – Authenticated Request (13:59)
Local Users – Authenticated Request, the Login Module and Role Mapper (18:03)
An In-depth Look at the User Filter (23:22)

2. Users’ Profiles (27:51)

User Profiles & Management (27:58)
Synchronization: Real-Time & Batch (31:10)
LDAP.XML – Example ldap.xml configuration file (34:29)

3. Process Entitlements (34:55)

Entitlements and Swimlanes (35:13)
Token Participant - How is the Token Participant affecting the end users? (38:03)
Portal – How does the Swimlane configuration affect the portal? (39:33)
Access Policies – What are Access Policies? & Can you start a process? (40:50)

4. Additional Entitlements (41:54)

Access Policies – What other restrictions can be imposed by using Access Policies? (42:13)
Solution Specific Checks – How can fine grained checks be implemented? (43:55)

5. Conclusion (45:00)

This presentation is draws heavily from the Authentication and Authorization documentation, head there if you would like more information on the topics covered.

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.17

Published November 30, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.3.17 patch release.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.27

Published November 30, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details, see Appway 6.2.27 patch release.

Announcement: Support Tickets and the Weekly Digest

Published November 28, 2016 by Cate

Deployment

Workspace

When reading through our blog posts, you will have noticed that the patch release information is no longer being published here on developer.appway.com. Instead, you are redirected to our new Community platform, community.appway.com. There, in the Support News section, you can find the latest information about our patch releases and product updates.

This signposting is one of the many visible ways being used to bridge the transition from Developer over to Community.

Migration of Support
Another part of Support, our Support Ticketing System, is also part of this transition. Certain selected projects have now been migrated to community.appway.com (your Appway CSM or EL will have already informed you if you are one of these migrated projects). The next wave of migration is scheduled to take place before the end of the year.

Until ticket migration is completed, our two Support systems will be running in parallel. No information is being deleted during migration. Please note that in order to streamline our Support service, Support Tickets that have been migrated over to Community are now read-only on developer.appway.com.

How does this affect the Weekly Digest?
The Weekly Digest only contains material from developer.appway.com, and does not include anything from community.appway.com. That means it is not possible to include up-to-date information about Support Tickets that have been migrated to community.appway.com.

In order to eliminate confusion over the status of Support Tickets, we have therefore taken the decision to completely remove Support Tickets from the Developer Weekly Digest. Your tickets still exist – you just won’t receive this weekly summary of open tickets anymore. This affects everyone, not just those people whose projects have already been migrated over to Community.

The latest blog posts, recipes and documentation will continue to be included in the Weekly Digest.

If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact the Community Team at community@appway.com

An In-Depth Dive into Ways to Improve Screen Performance

Published November 18, 2016 by Alex Cahiz

There's been a policy of "sharing by default" ever since the start of the Appway Developer community platform in 2013. Sharing knowledge and ideas brings huge value into the community, and we always strive to make valuable content available to you as quickly as we can.

Lots of valuable content was shared this year at Appway Sphere 2016 – sessions covered JAAS authorization, Integration Links, and using CSS, for example. Attendees had the opportunity to gain key insights, and immediately ask expert Appway staff any questions raised by the presentations.

But we're keeping "sharing by default" in mind: We will be releasing the video recordings of these sessions over the course of the next couple of months. They will be available to everyone, even if you couldn't make it to Appway Sphere this year. We'll also connect the videos with related content from across our knowledge base.

Introducing the First Video: Screen Performance
Screen performance is a key part of an effective Appway solution. Have you read the recipe we recently published, Improving Screen Performance? After explaining the Appway Screen lifecycle, the recipe provides four different techniques you can apply to help tune screen performance. Now you can watch the recipe in action!

We are very proud to present the Appway Sphere 2016 session hosted by Appway Senior Software Engineer, Stephan Markwalder, on "Ways to Improve Screen Performance".

Here's an interactive table of contents that links directly to the section of the video described below:

1. Intro (00:29)

2. Screen Phases Recap (03:05)

Screen Lifecycle (1): Introducing Phases: Update, Validate, Process, Render (03:35)
Screen Lifecycle (2): Performance: Perception vs. Reality (10:42)
Screen Lifecycle (3): Screen Rendering in Action (15:35)
Screen Lifecycle (4): Skipping Phases (20:15)

3. "Phase Control" Screen Component

Phase Control Component (28:25)
What Phases Can Be Skipped? (39:04)
Skipping the Render Phase in AJAX update (48:52)

4. Leveraging the "Screen Cache" Screen Component (1:05:56)

5. "Read Me First": What to Know Before Using Performance Improvement Tools (1:18:02)

We hope this video, along with the recipe, gives you an even better insight into improving screen performance.

Would you like to see more video content like this? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.16

Published November 16, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details on the Appway 6.3.16 patch release, see here.

Master the Appway – Certification Program

Published November 14, 2016 by n/A

Whether you are just starting to work professionally with Appway or have been a developer for years, it is always satisfying to get recognition for the time you’ve put into learning the Appway platform. We know from experience that companies are looking for assurance that their projects, and the people working on them, meet their expectations in terms of high standards and great quality.

There’s no better way to show your level of expertise than to get an Appway Certification.

Achieving certification with Appway allows you to demonstrate your level of proficiency with the concepts, terminology and practice around Appway. Our program provides successful candidates with an official certificate recognized across the market.

We offer three levels of certification: Practitioner, Professional, and Master. Each level is focused around a specific stage of knowledge and experience with Appway.

Practitioner (online exam — 60 questions — 90 min)

Earning the Practitioner-level certification shows that you have a solid grasp of the basics of Appway, and the proficiency to work in the Appway Studio. You have a general understanding of data classes and scripting, document design, and document generation.

We now offer Appway Practitioner Certification via our e-Learning platform. Candidates automatically receive one free attempt at the Practitioner-level exam if they are registered on our e-Learning platform.

Professional (online exam — 120 min)

Appway Professional certification is divided into three streams, tailored to the typical profiles of candidates working at this level.

Professional Business Analyst

Gaining the Business Analyst certification shows your ability to manage requirements and ensure customer success by playing a quality assurance role in the project.

Professional Developer

Completing the Developer stream demonstrates your ability to discuss technical solutions, implement all complex objects in the project, as well as design the overall process (including features such as parallel activities, messages, and signals).

Professional Administrator

As a Certified Administrator you know how to run an Appway environment from installation through maintenance and housekeeping to deployment, taking responsibility for configuration, updates, and incident troubleshooting.

Once you've got one Professional-level certification in your pocket, why not start working towards broadening your range of skills and attempting a different Professional-level exam?

Master (case study — half-day on-site)

As a certified Master you have the full range of Appway skills and experience. You can install and configure an Appway server, are confident with all Appway concepts and principles, can lead quality assurance efforts, and have the ability to solve complex technical problems thanks to your years of project exposure.

To learn more and to find full details on pricing and requirements please download our Appway Academy Catalogue (PDF) or send an email to academy@appway.com

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.15

Published November 7, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details on the Appway 6.3.15 patch release, see here.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.26

Published November 7, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details on the Appway 6.2.26 patch release, see here.

Community Conversations: Insights from Appway Sphere

Published October 31, 2016 by Alex Cahiz

It’s been just over a month since Appway Sphere 2016 took place here in Zurich. With three streams covering everything from the Appway 7 release to JAAS to Business Components, there was plenty on offer. We also had the opportunity to talk to people from Fincons, Quatico, Axa, Serial, GFT and Credit Suisse, to name a few, and hear your invaluable feedback.

Here are three insights about the content on our platform that we got from those who attended the event. A big thank you to all of you who took the time to share your input!

1. Bring the Content to You

When asked how you would prefer to receive information about new content in the Appway Community, the answer by a large margin was via the Weekly Digest. Workspace Notifications also ranked quite high, so we'll continue working on building and strengthening the notification system for community.appway.com. While we're working on that, we will continue to send the best content we can, straight to your inboxes.

Are there other channels you’d like to have new Appway updates delivered? Twitter? LinkedIn?

2. Delicious Recipes

When we asked you how you felt about the quality of the recipes in our Cookbook, the response was overwhelmingly positive! We are obviously very happy to hear this and are feverishly putting together new recipes as often as we can.

We also know that there is always room for improvement, so if you have some thoughts on what we could do to make recipes even better, tell us at community@appway.com

Contributing to the Cookbook is open to everyone: If you have a recipe or an idea for something you'd like to contribute, we want to hear it!

3. Polish Those Docs

Upon asking about the quality of the Documentation, your response was generally leaning towards a need for improvement. But unfortunately, details were sparse on how we could achieve this. We obviously want to provide the very best technical documentation we can so please let us know where and how we can increase our efforts!

If you have feedback you'd like to share, you can always contact us via community@appway.com.
What can we do to make your Appway experience even better?

Be More Productive with Appway: The PDF Output Edition

Published October 24, 2016 by Cate

Basic PDF Design

Building on the tips and tricks provided in the previous five editions of the "Be More Productive" posts, this week's blog focuses on less well-known tricks you can use in the PDF Output Editor.

The key combinations work on Mac as well as on Windows.

Switch Selected Fields
When you're filling out a form online, you can usually use the Tab key to switch between fields. The same holds true when you're using the PDF Output Editor: You can switch the field selected by hitting the Tab key – and what's more, Shift-Tab reverses the direction in which the selection moves.

Resizing
Resizing an element is pretty simple: drag a handle to make the element smaller or larger. Did you know that if you hold the Shift key when resizing, you'll only resize horizontally OR vertically, not both?

Crosshairs
Getting fields and other items properly aligned with each other is important for the visual look-and-feel of your documents and PDFs. When you're in the PDF Output Editor, hold down Shift-CTRL and move your cursor: a crosshair appears to help you check alignment.

In case you missed them:
#1 Three Ways to be More Productive in the Appway Studio
#2 Three More Ways
#3 The "ALT" Edition
#4 The "CTRL" Edition
#5 The "Shift" Edition
#6 The PDF Output Edition

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Lightbulb image courtesy Brian Talbot / Flickr

SSL: What is it, and What Does it Do? (Part II)

Published October 17, 2016 by Brett Crawley

Welcome to the second part of our SSL blog. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer, and – as we read about in Part I – is a mechanism for securing a communication channel. SSL is also, however, a method of verifying the identity of the key owner. This post runs through how the identity of the server is verified.

Verification of Identity

Four conditions need to be checked to verify the identity of the key owner:

The hostname of the server must be verified.
The certificate, or one of its signatories, has to be signed by a third party that is known to be trusted.
None of the certificates in the chain must have expired.
None of the certificates in the chain must have been revoked.

Let's look at these one by one.

1. Hostname Verification

I'll use an example of something called a "Man-In-The-Middle" attack.

I connect to server X over SSL – or at least I think I have. The server presents me with a certificate that isn't for server X, but for server Y. Server Y could have used DNS poisoning or some other means to fake being server X, and is using its own certificate to fool you into believing the connection is secure. If you continue, and do not verify the hostname against the certificate’s common name (CN), you would be passing private information to some unknown party.

A check should always be made to ensure that the hostname and the certificate’s CN match. It's important to remember, however, that this still does not guarantee you are talking to the desired server if the other conditions listed below have also not been met.

2. Certificate Signatures

In the above Man-In-The-Middle attack, if server Y had used a self-signed certificate – a certificate that someone had created for themselves – verifying the certificate name against the hostname would give a positive result. But the certificate would not actually be the proper certificate for server X.

So how do we get around this issue? Certificate Authorities.

There are a number of bodies around the world called Certificate Authorities. Before issuing certificates, these Authorities carry out certain checks on the companies or individuals that have requested the certificates. Example bodies include Verisign, Thawte and Digicert (and there also are many more).

When issuing a certificate, the Certificate Authority signs the certificate using their own certificates, vouching for the authenticity / identity of the individual or company requesting the certificate. Certificates from these Authorities are considered trustworthy, and most operating systems and virtual machines include a collection of these certificates in a repository. The certificates in the repository can then be retrieved to check that the certificate the server presented has been signed by one of the trusted authorities.

So back to the example. If server X's certificate has been signed by one of these authorities, we know that certain checks were carried out before the certificate was issued. However, server X's certificate may not have been signed directly by one of these authorities. It may have been signed by some other body that itself has been verified by one of the authorities. So to check for a valid signature we must check if there is a certificate for an Authority that we trust, somewhere within the chain of signatories' certificates.

Let's say that we have found a certificate from a trusted certificate authority. There are still a couple of checks left to do.

3. Expired Certificates

We need to check that none of the certificates in the chain has expired. Expired certificates may be out of date because the company is no longer in existence, or for any number of other reasons.

Thawte argue that you should pay close attention to the signing and the expiration dates of the certificate: "The shorter the life span of a certificate, the more frequently the identity of the signer is verified by the certificate authority."

While there may not be any malicious intent behind an expired certificate, not trusting expired certificates is always the better option.

4. Revoked Certificates

Our last check is to verify that none of the certificates in the chain has been revoked. Certificates can be revoked because the company has been found untrustworthy, the certificate was compromised in some way (such as theft), or for some other reason.

If all of the previous checks (outlined in 1-3) have returned positive results, then we can pretty much be certain that the connection can be trusted, but keep in mind that this trust does not come with 100% certainty. Someone could be taking advantage of ZERO-Day bugs or other vulnerabilities and may have compromised the certificate, using it before anyone has had a chance to react. In most situations, however, you can rely on these checks being sufficient.

Server Authentication and Client Authentication

Server Authentication

So far we have only covered the most common case, Server authentication, where the end user is verifying the identity of the server. Let's quickly recap:

Only the server certificate is used
Only the identity of the server is validated

The sequence of events for server authentication can be seen in the diagram below:

The user requests a resource from the server using HTTPS, which usually communicates on TCP ports 443 or 8443. The server retrieves its public key from the key store, and supplies it during the handshake to the user's browser. The user's browser then checks the validity of the key, and if everything is OK, completes the handshake. The user's browser sends back the shared key which is used to open the SSL tunnel for secure communication.

There is another type of authentication, called client authentication.

Client Authentication

Sometimes referred to as "mutual authentication", client authentication does not just focus on the server.

In this case the server also verifies the user.

Both the server and the client use certificates
The identity of both parties is verified

The sequence of events for client authentication can be seen in the diagram below:

The process is much the same as that for server authentication. With client authentication, once verification of the server certificate has taken place, the client then sends their public key to the server for verification before the SSL tunnel is opened.

If you don’t need to verify the identity of a user, then server authentication is much simpler for end users: they don’t need to worry about obtaining a certificate before using your site (the verification process can take time), or have any understanding of the technical aspects. Server authentication facilitates the setting up of secure connections as users may not have a digital certificate, or may not be aware they have one ("smart cards" generally contain certificates).

On the other hand, if you need to be sure of a user’s identity – for legal reasons, for example – then mutual authentication is the correct choice. It requires the end user to be prepared with a certificate, but you can be sure that their identity has been pre-verified.

Conclusion

Having the certainty that you're connected with the site you were expecting to be connected to is important. This applies for individuals as well as companies that may be sharing and/or storing sensitive data – for example within the context of Appway Onboarding. Trust runs both ways: just as your clients trust your company, it's also important to have that same certainty with regard to the identity of your customers.

Patch Release: Appway WebServices Extension 2.3.33

Published October 12, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details on the Appway WebServices Extension 2.3.33 patch release, see here.

SSL: What is it, and What Does it Do? (Part I)

Published October 10, 2016 by Brett Crawley

SSL stands for "Secure Socket Layer" — but that in itself isn't an explanation. So what is SSL, and what does it do?

You come across SSL whenever you connect to the Appway platform via HTTPS. SSL is important because it protects you from snooping in your corporate network, and allows you to be sure you're connected to the server you expect to be connected to. SSL closes the communication channel to unwanted predators. To briefly sum up the benefits of using Secure Socket Layer technology:

SSL is a mechanism for securing a communication channel.
SSL is a method of verifying the identity of the key owner.

The advantages of SSL are that data cannot be stolen in transit, and identities are verified.

This first blog post looks at securing the communication channel, with Part II covering identity verification.

Securing the Communication Channel

"Why do we need a secure channel? Don't we have passwords for that?"

Passwords are a means of authentication, which verify a user is who they claim to be. But it's critical to understand that passwords are not a useful security measure if the channel through which passwords are transmitted is not secure.

If the channel is not secure, the passwords can be intercepted. The identity of a user can then be compromised, as someone else could authenticate themselves as that "user".

Take this scenario as an example:

User A is logging in to server X on the network. Somewhere else on the network, a hacker has connected and is using a packet sniffer (a tool for capturing network packets containing data such as HTTP traffic). The hacker is looking for the user credentials of people authenticating over insecure channels (such as plain HTTP).

Let's say User A was logging in to a mail server, "webmail.register.it", via plain HTTP, and that User A's username is blah@blah.com.

Here's a screenshot of a packet capture made using the Wireshark packet sniffer tool:

If User A had logged in to the mail server over HTTPS, the hacker would not have been able to see the username, "blah@blah.com", and password, "test1234", as the packets would have been encrypted.

So how is the communication channel made secure?

While setting up the connection to the server, the server passes your browser its public key, and specifies the encryption algorithms it can use.
Your browser then determines the strongest common algorithm, and creates a symmetric key that both parties can use for encryption and decryption.
Your browser uses the asymmetric public key of the server to encrypt a message containing the algorithm to use and the shared symmetric key, and then sends this message to the server.
The server decrypts the message with its private key. Both parties now know the algorithm to be used, and the shared symmetric key for both encryption and decryption.
A TCP socket connection is made, and communication over this socket is now encrypted using the shared key between the two parties.

Summary

If your communication channel is not secure, passwords and other sensitive information can be discovered – no matter how strong your password is. The channel itself needs to be secure. SSL technology allows for encryption before a TCP socket connection is made, and is the first step toward secure communication.

Next week, Part II covers identity verification and certificates, taking a look at Certificate Authorities and server authentication. Having a secured communication channel is only half of the story: Your device needs to know it's communicating with the right server.

e-Learning: A Whole New Way to Learn Appway

Published October 3, 2016 by n/A

"Digitalization" is a keyword in the fintech space – and it's one with substance. Moving services online provides people with greater flexibility, and the opportunity to work when and where they want. We're taking this concept to heart at Appway, and applying it to the services we provide.

Many of you have probably attended training provided by Appway Academy, either in Zurich, Chiasso, or New York – or maybe remotely, via webinar. Now you have another option.

The Appway Academy are very proud to announce the launch of Appway e-Learning:
https://e-learning.appway.com

Appway e-Learning: Educational, Engaging, Fun
Appway is a powerful tool, and we want to ensure you get the most out of it from day one.

Online training gives you greater flexibility – a learning method that you can fit around your schedule. Complete the modular training step by step, and then take the opportunity to revisit topics you need to brush up on. From learning the basics to diving deeper into the Workspace, e-Learning will get you up to speed whenever and wherever you need it.

We believe you should find the training educational, engaging and fun, so we've built interactive new features that enhance learning in a self-paced manner. Each lesson explores the importance of the topic at hand, as well as the theory behind it. Lessons also include demos to show you what Appway can do.

You'll complete quizzes that highlight the most important points while also testing your knowledge.

Lessons provide you with the chance to get hands-on with Appway as well. We’ve made sure to design our practical exercises so that you finish the lesson with a feeling of accomplishment.

Learning options
Our e-Learning lessons can be combined with Coaching sessions from our expert trainers to help you get the most out of your learning experience. And don't worry, our classroom training will continue to be provided!

For more information about e-Learning, contact the Appway Academy via academy@appway.com or try a taster lesson today at e-learning.appway.com.

Announcing the Arrival of Support News

Published September 26, 2016 by Cate

If you were at Appway Sphere last week you got this news first-hand: the Support News channel is now live! This new channel can be found on community.appway.com, as part of the Community portal beta release.

Community.appway.com will be a one-stop shop for anyone working with Appway. The Community platform is currently available in beta only as we continue to develop more of the features and functionality expected by you, our community.

Content and services will gradually transition from the Appway Developer platform to the Appway Community platform over the course of 2016–2017. We'll be sending out more detailed information about community.appway.com shortly.

First step on the journey: Support News
As a first step, we decided to streamline communication of Support-related product information. Future announcements on the following topics will only be available via the Community platform's Support News channel:

Appway releases (patch releases and full versions)
Technical requirements and compatibility
Important known issues

This information will no longer be included in the Developer blog.

If you have any questions, please get in touch: community@appway.com

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.14

Published September 22, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details on the Appway 6.3.14 patch release, see here.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.25

Published September 22, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Announcements concerning patch releases have moved to the Support News section of the Appway Community.

For details on the Appway 6.2.25 patch release, see here.

See You at Appway Sphere 2016!

Published September 19, 2016 by Cate

Just one day left until our annual conference, Appway Sphere, arrives!

Appway HQ here in Zurich is buzzing with excitement and anticipation: We cannot wait to share the latest news and updates with you, and hear what you have to say. You'll get to see exclusive sneak peeks into what Appway software of the future will look like, as well as hear leading industry experts on the intersection of customer experience, digitalization, and business applications.

Appway Sphere is two days full of demos, best practice and knowledge-sharing — and great people. The Appway Customer Success Team are going to be there and are looking forward to meeting you in person. Visit our booths to find out the latest information on the Appway Community, share your feedback, and experience the brand new training now available from Appway Academy (I'm not going to spoil the surprise!).

We'll be there throughout the whole conference. Take a couple of minutes to come chat over coffee — how can we help support your journey?

See you there!

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.13

Published September 13, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Appway 6.3.13, the latest patch release for Appway 6.3, is now available for download. It contains 3 new features and 1 change.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.3.12 to 6.3.13.

The highlights of this patch release are:

Security

It is now possible to change the KeyStore and TrustStore passwords periodically according to your needs (password policies etc.).

Component Extension

A new version of the Component extension, 6.3.15, is available. It contains 1 feature, 2 changes and 1 bugfix.

For more information, see the Appway 6.3.13 Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.24

Published September 13, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Appway 6.2.24, the latest patch release for Appway 6.2, is now available for download. It contains 1 new feature.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.23 to 6.2.24.

The highlight of this patch release is:

Security

It is now possible to change the KeyStore and TrustStore passwords periodically according to your needs (password policies etc.).

For more information, see the Appway 6.2.24 Release Notes (PDF).

New from Appway Academy: Appway Onboarding Training

Published September 12, 2016 by n/A

Appway Academy are proud to announce a new, extended Appway Onboarding Training available from September 2016. This expert training is a two-day deep dive into the Appway Onboarding-specific Business Components provided with the Appway Onboarding solution, showing you how the Onboarding components are controlled, configured and used.

You'll gain insight into how the product is built, and understand how the Components are connected to each other. You will also discover how the solution can be further developed to suit your own specific business needs and requirements:

Add new use cases, roles, and responsible teams per region.
Add your own questionnaires, or add questions to existing templates.
Add properties to the comment trail, and display and download the comment stream.
Understand the construction of the automated section, and add your own sections.

Training Requirements
Appway Onboarding Training is only available to clients with Appway Onboarding already installed.
You must have completed Fundamental Training before registering for Appway Onboarding training.

Ready to learn more? Register for the next Public Session in Zurich via the Appway Onboarding Training page.

Appway Sphere: Innovation, Digitalization and Connection

Published September 5, 2016 by Alex Cahiz

Our annual conference, Appway Sphere, is coming up in a few weeks. For those of you who attended in 2015 we would love to see you again in Zurich on September 20-21. If this is your first time, don't miss out on the chance to interact with our product innovators, learn more about the latest tools and strategies, and explore the power of using Appway!

We listened to the feedback from last year’s attendees and have developed a program to better meet your needs:

More insights into Appway's products and solutions
A look ahead at the company roadmap
Product demos - including an exclusive sneak peek into our upcoming release of Appway 7
A variety of sessions for Appway developers to enhance their knowledge and skills
More opportunities to talk to product innovators

Appway would be nothing without you, our community of developers, analysts, admins and partners. Having a strong connection with you makes our jobs more rewarding, and helps us find ways to make your lives easier.

Exclusive offer
To show our appreciation, we are offering a special deal to all our awesome Appway developers for Day 2 of Appway Sphere, taking place on September 21. This offer is ONLY available for the next 3 days, so sign up fast at appway.com/sphere2016 using your special code: ifDeveloperthenJoin

See you at Appway Sphere 2016!

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.12

Published August 25, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Appway 6.3.12, the latest patch release for Appway 6.3, is now available for download. It contains 2 new features, 3 changes and 9 bugfixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.3.10 to 6.3.12.

The highlights of this patch release are:

Refactoring

Refactoring a Data Class ID is now reflected correctly in inline variable declarations such as "ForEach Data $d In $ds Do" and in scripts on indexed collection instantiation types such as "Indexed Data $d := new Indexed Data;".

PDF

Additional placeholders for page numbering while rendering in duplex mode are available. These placeholders can be used in PDF Output Text components. The new placeholders are: $$KD, $$OD[0-9], $$XD, $$XDO, $$N, $$NP and $$XO.

Fast Track

The "Find" command is now only available to users with access to the "Administration" section and the "Start" command is now only available to users with access to the "Library" section. The "Evaluate" command has been removed completely.

Furthermore, you can use the new configuration property "nm.fasttrack.commands.enabled" to control the list of supported commands in Fast Track. The default value "*" enables all Fast Track commands. Enter a comma-separated list of command names (e.g. "Help,Open,Start") to enable only specific commands. If the list is empty (no value), Fast Track is not available at all.

Data Table

When the table model supports only one precision (match case / ignore case) for a filter, the corresponding dialog no longer shows a disabled checkbox for that state. Instead it shows a simple label telling the user which precision the filter uses.

For more information, see the Appway 6.3.12 Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.23

Published August 25, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Appway 6.2.23, the latest patch release for Appway 6.2, is now available for download. It contains 1 change and 5 bugfixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.21 to 6.2.23.

The highlight of this patch release is:

Refactoring

Refactoring a Data Class ID is now reflected correctly in inline variable declarations such as "ForEach Data $d In $ds Do" and in scripts on indexed collection instantiation types such as "Indexed Data $d := new Indexed Data;".

For more information, see the Appway 6.2.23 Release Notes (PDF).

Connect, Discover and Learn at Appway Sphere 2016

Published August 22, 2016 by Cate

Application Design

Screen Design

Appway Concepts

Our global conference, Appway Sphere, is a space where our community of partners, customers, friends, and followers can share visions and achievements.

It's an opportunity for the Appway community to present their projects, receive insights from others, and network with peers and experts. It's also a chance to meet the creators and innovators developing Appway’s core technology, and hear from them first-hand about a variety of topics.

This year you can expect exciting updates about our products and services, straight from the Product Leads themselves. With a mix of theory and hands-on work, Appway developers, engineers and UX professionals will coach you on how to get the most out of Appway. Discuss best and next practices with project specialists, and go behind the scenes at Appway AG.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the sessions taking place:

Product Lead Nina Schneider on Appway 7 and beyond
Senior Software Engineer Stephan Markwalder on improving Screen performance
Lead Solution Engineer Mauro Labate on JAAS security
Senior UX Consultant Adriana Ispas on design patterns and new Workspace capabilities

Register today using the promo code EARLYBIRD2016 to take advantage of our early bird prices. If you are a customer, please reach out to your account manager for special offers.

To learn more about what you can expect at Appway Sphere 2016, watch our invitation video and visit the Sphere 2016 website, appway.com/sphere2016

We look forward to seeing you there!

Appway Academy in New York City!

Published August 22, 2016 by n/A

We welcome you to join our first Appway Academy Public Sessions organized in New York City this September, and are happy to announce that our Fundamental and Developer sessions are now open for registration.

The Fundamental training is designed for people with no prior knowledge of Appway, while Developer builds on the Fundamental training to take your knowledge to the next level. Learn by doing with interactive teaching and practical exercises.

Appway Fundamental Training - 7–9 Sept, 2016 (3 days)
Three days, six modules and everything you need to know to get started with Appway. Understand the process-oriented approach, create a simple process-driven application from scratch, build screens, and navigate the Appway Studio with confidence.

For more details and online registration: https://www.appway.com/course/fundamental

Appway Developer Training - 12–16 Sept, 2016 (5 days)
Dive deeper and gain in-depth knowledge on how to develop solutions within Appway. Training includes practical exercises with advanced functionalities, and advice on best practices when developing applications.

For more details and online registration: https://www.appway.com/course/developer

We look forward to seeing you there!

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Image: Alexander Rotker / Unsplash

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.10

Published July 27, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Appway 6.3.10, the latest patch release for Appway 6.3, is now available for download. It contains 1 change and 7 bugfixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.3.9 to 6.3.10.

The highlight of this patch release is:

HtmlIdAutomation Extension

A new version of the HtmlIdAutomation extension, 1.0.0, is now available. It contains 1 change and 1 bugfix.

!Important! The default delimiter was changed from ':' to '-'. If you are using the '-' dash as the default delimiter, update to the following extensions to ensure components continue to function correctly:
Appway 6.3.x => ChartingExtension 4.0.2 and ComponentExtension 6.3.12

For more information, see the Appway 6.3.10 Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.21

Published July 27, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Appway 6.2.21, the latest patch release for Appway 6.2, is now available for download. It contains 1 change and 4 bugfixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.20 to 6.2.21.

The highlight of this patch release is:

HtmlIdAutomation Extension

A new version of the HtmlIdAutomation extension, 1.0.0, is now available. It contains 1 change and 1 bugfix.

!Important! The default delimiter was changed from ':' to '-'. If you are using the '-' dash as the default delimiter, update to the following extensions to ensure components continue to function correctly:
Appway 6.2.x => ChartingExtension 3.4.2 and ComponentExtension 6.2.23

For more information, see the Appway 6.2.21 Release Notes (PDF).

The Origin of Appbird

Published July 25, 2016 by Cate

Appway Concepts

If you're running Appway 6.3 you'll most likely have seen a screen or two featuring a bird. The birds are there to help guide you when something unexpected happens, and also get you back to where you need to be in your solution.

They're pretty friendly creatures, and want to make sure you can continue with your tasks as easily as possible. But why did we decide on a bird?

This little bird – an "Appbird" to be more precise - is actually our company mascot. The Appbird has been with us for quite a while, accompanying us on our journey from offices in Zürich to offices around the world. When they're not appearing in the Workspace, they like to fly rockets – speed is as important to Appbirds as it is to our customers.

Many brands take care of the smallest details when engaging their users, and it’s a philosophy we subscribe to as well. The attention to detail extends the brand experience, and makes it more effective. Take another look at the parachute worn by the Appbird at the start of this post….

Appway has always believed in investing in our products to make them powerful, yet elegant, on the technical front. We also think that the visual details that support the product add value to it. Appway is more than just technology: It's a product of the company culture surrounding it.

Hatching the Idea
The Appbirds didn't always look like they do now, and they've been through many iterations. It all started with Appway CTO Oliver Brupbacher's original doodle of birds on a wire.

The birds continued to appear on walls, whiteboards, stickers and clothing…

And then, in 2015, the Appbirds made the transition to the digital realm.

Preparing for take-off
The very first step in digitalizing our Appbird was, ironically, done offline. Multiple pencil and ink sketches were created to help us understand what could best suit the product. We knew that the same bird should appear in various incarnations depending on the screen, with the same proportions and design each time.

Through an iterative design process and internal user testing, we discovered that displaying more negative images when something unwelcome happened was not the best user experience — and not the user experience we wanted to provide. Instead, Appbirds should help indicate how the issue could be resolved, and guide users to where they need to be in the solution.

The Appbird is just one of many visual details within the Appway Studio and Workspace, and one you're going to be seeing more of.

Just because the Appbird has made the leap into the digital realm does not mean that the little birds have disappeared from the physical world completely: Every so often, a little sketch still appears on our office whiteboards, brightening up our day.

So there you have it: a short history of the Appbird. From humble beginnings to a fully-fledged digital creation, our little bird has been on quite a journey.

P.S. If you – or someone using your solution - suffers from ornithophobia: Don't worry! Our screens can be configured and customized. This chapter in our product documentation shows you how.

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.9

Published July 15, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Extensions

Appway 6.3.9, the latest patch release for Appway 6.3, is now available for download. It contains 1 new feature, 6 changes and 13 bugfixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.3.7 to 6.3.9.

The highlights of this patch release are:

Security
The Apache Commons FileUpload library was updated from version 1.3.1 to 1.3.2. This is a fix for CVE-2016-3092.

Data Table
The 'onfetched' action has been added for Data Tables. This action is triggered every time the Data Table retrieves new rows.

Component Extension
A new version of the Component extension, 6.3.11, is now available. Since version 6.3.9 of the extension, 2 changes and 8 bugfixes have been implemented.

For more information, see the Appway 6.3.9 Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.20

Published July 15, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Appway 6.2.20, the latest patch release for Appway 6.2, is now available for download. It contains 1 new feature, 4 changes and 3 bugfixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.18 to 6.2.20.

The highlights of this patch release are:

Security
The Apache Commons FileUpload library was updated from version 1.3.1 to 1.3.2. This is a fix for CVE-2016-3092.

Data Table
The 'onfetched' action has been added for Data Tables. This action is triggered every time the Data Table retrieves new rows.

For more information, see the Appway 6.2.20 Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 5.3.20

Published July 15, 2016 by Dirk Goehmann

Appway 5.3.20, the latest patch release for Appway 5.3, is now available for download. It contains 4 changes and 1 bugfix.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 5.3.19 to 5.3.20.

The highlights of this patch release are:

Security
The Apache Commons FileUpload library was updated from version 1.3.1 to 1.3.2 and its dependency on Commons IO from 2.0.1 to 2.2. This is a fix for CVE-2016-3092.

Shutdown
Process engine threads are no longer interrupted during shutdown. Instead, they get notified after setting the stop flag. If a thread is currently executing a process job, the job execution completes normally. Afterwards, the thread will exit. Interrupting the thread has led to unexpected side-effects.

For more information, see the Appway 5.3.20 Release Notes (PDF).

Bridging the Icon Awareness Gap

Published July 4, 2016 by Pank

Screen Design

Icons can add value for users when they help provide simple visual shortcuts within the user interface. However, apart from a small set of commonly-used icons, most people have no clue what a majority of icons actually mean.

Icons play a significant role in the user interface of an app. Best practice is to always use icons in combination with labels: It helps avoid confusion, misinterpretation or ambiguity and, in general, doesn't add unnecessary mental burden on the end user. There are only a few possible cases where a label may not be necessary: for universally-known icons such as the floppy disk for "Save", for example.

Workspace Design Note #8: Icons discusses the impact icons can have — and how best to work with them. I'd recommend you read that post for a great introduction to the basics of using icons in your solution before continuing.

But now let's assume you've made an informed decision about where icons are going to be used in your Appway solution. You also have an idea of which icons you'd like to use. Applying the concepts of resemblance, reference and convention when choosing which icons to use can help bridge this awareness gap.

Icons by resemblance, reference, and convention
Icons can add value for users when they help provide simple visual shortcuts within the user interface. However, apart from a small set of commonly-used icons, most people have no clue what a majority of icons actually mean.

Applying the concepts of resemblance, reference and convention when choosing which icons to use can help bridge this awareness gap.

Resemblance icons are icons that literally resemble a physical object. An example of a resemblance icon would be a trashcan icon, often found on your computer's desktop. The icon resembles a physical trashcan and signifies to the user, "this is where you put things you no longer need".

Reference icons are icons that depict an action via a physical object. An example of a reference icon would be a pencil to signify the action, "edit". Things written with a pencil on paper can easily be edited: You can erase, and rewrite or redraw what you want multiple times. Therefore the concept of editing is often referenced using an icon of a pencil.

Convention icons are icons that use an arbitrary shape that is understood due to common convention. Convention icons might start out as resemblance or reference icons, and only later become understood as convention icons. For example, when the "Save" icon was depicted as a floppy disk, it would have been categorized under the resemblance category, because users actually did use to save files on floppy disk. However, floppy disks became obsolete, replaced by hard drives and other storage devices. The "floppy disk" icon as an indicator for "save" became an apparently arbitrary choice of icon for the generation of people who had never interacted with a floppy disk. The small square icon is now understood as a visual convention that represents the action of "saving". A further example would be the triangular "Warning" icon, which is commonly seen on traffic signs and also perceived as a convention.

The final dimension to take into consideration is context. An icon may resemble a physical object and seem to be a completely appropriate choice – but if that icon does not have contextual meaning (including cultural context) then users are not likely to understand the message you are trying to convey. Only identifying whether an icon could be based on resemblance, reference, and/or convention does not determine whether it would be the correct icon to use.

Illustrating the point
Here are two examples inspired by our Client Onboarding solution: The use of icons in risk ratings, and the use of text-based icons to communicate "Yes/No" answers.

1. Risk Rating
There are normally four predefined "Risk Rating" statuses in any business relationship in Appway: low, medium, high, and ultra-high. They define the level of risk for a party, and help inform the user regarding any further action required.

These statuses are represented using the following family of icons:

The speedometer works as a symbol for "risk" using the analogy of speed: The greater the speed, the higher the risk. It is easy to show four different levels of risk using this icon as there are four visually distinct versions of the icon.

However, sometimes there is a requirement to show fewer than four statuses. What if only two statuses are required: "low" and "high"? How do you show that in your solution? And what if there is no icon that fulfils this requirement in the DefaultIcons extension?

This would be a good time to consult the Appway UX team in order to discuss an appropriate solution.

For showing two statuses, "low" and "high", there should be two sections rather than four. In the example below, we can see that the speedometer is showing a lower value, and a higher value. But why would it not be a good idea to use the following icons?

It would not be a good approach because these icons are not particularly suitable: They represent 50% (medium) and 100% (ultra-high) risk, rather than low and high risk.

Low risk must signify a value less than half-way along the speedometer. The indicator for high risk must signify a value greater than half-way, but less than "full speed".

Hence, suitable icons would be:

The UX team strongly recommends only using icons contained in the DefaultIcons extension in order to ensure future compatibility. If you require a specific icon that is not contained in the extension, please consult the Appway UX Team for further information.

2. Text-based icons
Sometimes there is a need to represent binary information("Yes/No" or "On/Off") within icons. These binary statuses are often very impactful and can determine whether your institution wishes to continue a business relationship with the client.

FATCA indicia are an example of this: Risk is evaluated based on the binary answers, "Yes" or "No". Earlier versions of the COB solution used to have "Yes/No" text as an icon, with the corresponding level of risk reflected by the color: Red indicated there was risk associated with this indicia, and green indicated the absence of risk.

If a party to the account was born was in a US territory, this is considered a risk factor according to FATCA rules. The icon to represent this was the word "Yes" with a red background.

From a visual point of view, having a red "Yes" icon and a green "No" icon seemed contradictory: Conventionally we equate "yes", and the color green, with positive feedback — whereas "no"’ and the color red are associated with negative feedback. Improvements were therefore necessary.

After some research, we understood that such icons need an accompanying label/text in order to ensure the right message is conveyed. Creating a colored icon complemented by a supporting text gives the user clarity, and removes any visual contradiction. We therefore divided the answers for FATCA indicia into two: The "Detected Match" area which displays the "Yes/No" text, and the "Risk Evaluation" area which indicates the risk status with colored icons (either a warning or a checkmark icon).

Takeaways
Icons can – if used well – be a great addition to your solution. Applying them correctly, however, is not as easy as it might appear. Here are some key takeaways to keep in mind:

Users recognize icons based on resemblance, reference, and convention. However, the context of an icon is equally as important.
Appway offers a DefaultIcons extension that contains more than 150 ready-to-use icons. They are easy to install, and are visually consistent with the Appway Workspace. The color and size of these icons can be customized.
Consult the Appway UX team regarding use cases not covered by the library of icons provided with the extension.

Workspace Design Notes #18: Don't Play Hide and Seek

Published June 27, 2016 by Lukas Mathis

Screen Design

Usability

Previous Design Notes tackling the topic of "why" – "Why the Flow Bar is at the Bottom" and "Why Use the Border Layout Manager", for example – have taken a deep dive into one specific design decision taken by the Appway Product and UX teams. This post continues that approach, examining why there's no "collapsible section" component within Appway.

You've probably seen a form like this before:

In this form, the user can click on the small "+" or "-" buttons to the right of each header to expand or collapse the corresponding section.

While it's technically possible to implement this feature in Appway using built-in components, Appway intentionally does not have a "collapsible section" component, or any kind of high-level feature specifically for creating collapsible sections.

Why?

Collapsible sections cause confusion.

I actually had trouble finding screenshots of a form with collapsible sections for this post, because these collapsible sections have fallen out of favor recently - and for good reason: They make form usability worse in 99% of all situations.

Note: All of the issues that collapsible sections have also apply to tabs. This is why we also strongly recommend against using tabs to organize forms.

Reason 1: Users don't really want them
It's true that people often request collapsible sections. But they request them because collapsible sections are a simple, "obvious" feature to request - not because they are actually going to be used.

When you measure how many people actually collapse the sections, you'll end up with numbers close to zero.
The simple fact is that in 99% of all cases, there is no reason to have collapsible sections. They don't solve any problems. There is no real use case for them. So people don't use them.

Collapsible sections make sense in theory, but think about it: How common is it that you use a form with collapsible sections, and actually collapse these sections? Does it happen in 50% of cases where you encounter a form with collapsible sections? Or do you collapse the sections just 10% of the time? More to the point: Have you ever collapsed one of these sections?

Now think about this: If you did once encounter a form with collapsible sections, and did collapse a section, why did you do it? What problem did you solve? Can you think of a better way of solving that problem? (Note: Hold that thought!)

Reason 2: Users use them by accident, and get confused
When we measure whether people actually use collapsible sections, we find that very, very few people (if any) use them. Interestingly, the people who do use them often do so by accident. Perhaps they were looking for a different feature, and clicked on the little [-] button just to see what it did. Or they touched it by accident on their phone.

In these situations, people often don't realize what has happened. To them, suddenly, part of the form is missing, and there may be no obvious way of getting it back.

In those situations, collapsible sections are indistinguishable from a bug in your solution.

Part of the form is missing, and users don't know why, or how to get it back? That's a support nightmare.

Reason 3: Users don't understand what they imply
But let's assume that your users understand how to expand and collapse sections, and that you've implemented the feature such that people don't get confused by accidentally collapsed sections.

Collapsible sections are still bad usability.

The Baymard Institute ran a usability test and found out that people did not understand what it meant for a section of a form to be closed. To quote:

"The issue arises when users can’t figure out which form fields will be submitted – whether it is only the fields in the currently active inline accordion or tab "sheet", or whether the collapsed "sheets" will be submitted as well."

When designing user-friendly form layouts it’s key to ensure that the user always instinctively knows which form fields will be submitted. Now, typically this is a non-issue since users assume all form fields will be submitted - and on most sites they are.

However, tab-style and inline accordion form layouts can muddy this relationship, making it unclear if the fields in each "sheet" are mutually exclusive or if switching between them simply toggles their visibility but not the actual form. This can make users uncertain as to which fields in the form will actually be submitted. As you can imagine, this is highly problematic as it leads to a sense of unpredictability and the fear of potential data loss.

Here's an actual quote from a user:

"Is it only the options that I’m currently seeing that will be submitted or will it submit all sections (including the 'collapsed' ones)?"

Collapsible sections make it look as if only part of the form is actually being submitted to the server. This means that users might accidentally submit bad information to the server, not understanding that the "hidden" data in the collapsible section is also being persisted.

Other Problems
When screens start out with collapsed sections, people can't scan them anymore to get an immediate understanding of what they're looking at.

When people use the browser's search function, and sections of the screen are collapsed, they won't be able to find text even if it's technically on the current screen.

If you have anchor links inside your screen, and link inside a collapsed section, these links won't work when the sections are collapsed.

This article lists more problems.

What to do instead
The most common case where collapsible sections are used is in long screens. It's tempting to allow people to shorten these screens by allowing them to collapse sections. Unfortunately, collapsible sections don't really solve that problem; they just add additional complexity to already complex screens, and shift the burden of managing that complexity to the user.

If you have long screens, you should instead use the Table of Contents component, and put it in the left sidebar. This allows users to immediately see what a screen contains, and then to easily navigate between different sections of the screen at any time.

For more information, see Navigating through Long Screens Using the Adaptive Table Of Contents Component.

If you must
If you are being asked for collapsible sections – or if you're the one asking for collapsible sections – first identify the problem you're trying to solve. What's the actual use case? Make sure that collapsible sections are not simply being requested out of habit.

If there is an actual problem to solve, collapsible sections are most likely still not the answer. In this case, please contact our team of UX consultants who will work together with you to find a good design solution for the problem.

While collapsible sections may seem like a good idea, they in fact aren't: they will cause usability and support problems.

Collapsible sections: The jetpack of UX
We all have an intuitive understanding of what makes a good user interface. This understanding is often partly based on customs we've gotten used to. A lot of the time, our intuition serves us well: If a lot of people do something, it's often a good idea to do the same thing. If everybody puts the search field into the header, putting your own search field into the header is a good starting point; even if it's not the best place within the context of your solution, at least it's no worse than what everybody else is doing.

Relying on intuition alone, however, is not a great idea because we're often mistaken about our own needs and about our users' needs. We don't think through all of the implications of a design decision, and we do something just because we've seen it before – not because it's actually a good idea.

Here's a secret: people are peculiar. Users behave in odd ways, have strange quirks, and in general rarely do what we want or expect them to do. And that's wonderful: that's what makes design so interesting.

That's why the field of UX design exists, why we do user research, and why we don't just go with our gut feeling: People are surprising, and our gut is often wrong.

Collapsible sections fall squarely into this category: You often see them on other websites, and intuitively, they seem to make sense. When you really do the research, though, you end up noticing that most people might think that they want them, but won't actually use them. Instead of making the user interface easier to understand and organize, they just add needless clutter.

Collapsible sections are like jet packs: a great idea in theory. In reality, you're just strapping a ton of unstable fuel to your back and waiting for it to explode while you're 200 feet up in the air. While user confusion and frustration are not quite so dramatic, they're still painful. Rethink the requirement, taking reality into consideration.

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.7

Published June 20, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

Integration Link

Rich Screen Controls

Appway 6.3.7, the latest patch release for Appway 6.3, is now available for download. It contains 2 new features, 3 changes and 9 bugfixes.

Integration Link
The behavior of the Integration Link has been changed so that it does not immediately execute asynchronous calls while the process is still being updated. Integration Link requests are immediately enqueued, but only executed when postCommit is called by the Commit Listener.

ComponentExtension
A new version of the ComponentExtension, version 6.3.9, is also now available. It contains 1 new feature and 3 bugfixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.3.6 to 6.3.7.

For more information please see the Appway 6.3.7 Patch Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.18

Published June 17, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

The latest patch release for Appway 6.2 is now available. Appway 6.2.18 is a small patch release containing 2 changes and 2 bugfixes. No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.17 to 6.2.18.

A new version of the ComponentExtension, version 6.2.22, is also now available. It contains 1 bugfix for the CKEditor.

For more information, please see the Appway 6.2.18 Patch Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.6

Published June 6, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

We're happy to announce that Appway 6.3.6 is now available.

It includes 6 new features, 4 changes and 16 bug fixes.

JavaScript and CSS file minification
The highlight of this release is an optimization for the Workspace: JavaScript and CSS files previously included in the HTML head are now merged, minified, and sent to the browser with correct cache control instructions. The browser now has to make only one request for the JavaScript code and one for the CSS code, and is then allowed to cache this content forever.

IMPORTANT: In order to benefit the most from this new feature in Appway, you need to install the latest version of the ComponentExtension: version 6.3.8.
Note: This new extension version is not backward compatible! Do not try to install it on an older version of Appway. It will not run.

Process Instance Persistence
Another important change is a fix for a bug related to persistence of process instances. The fix ensures that the modification time for a process instance is set to a value greater than the save time when a process instance is updated. Not doing so could have led to lost updates on a process instance when the process instance was updated twice within one millisecond.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.3.3 to 6.3.6.

For more detailed information please see the Appway 6.3.4 Patch Release Notes (PDF) and the Appway 6.3.6 Patch Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.17

Published June 3, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

A very small patch release, Appway 6.2.17, is now available for download. It contains 1 bugfix.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.16 to 6.2.17.

For more information, please see the Appway 6.2.17 Patch Release Notes (PDF).

Workspace Design Notes #17: Not All Errors Are Alike

Published May 30, 2016 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

Appway Concepts

Errors are something which everyone tries to avoid. Nevertheless, when a typo is introduced, or an outdated bookmark used, or when an older browser session is reopened, software can react in an unexpected way. In these situations it's important to provide guidance to your users so they understand what has happened.

Historically, Appway's error screens have been pretty bland and discouraging. If something went wrong, this is what Appway showed you:

This error screen looks technical and unfriendly, and, worse than that, it doesn't really tell you how to solve the problem.

Some errors in Appway are pretty common, and not indicative of anything having gone wrong. You've probably seen a "Workflow Token not found" error when using Appway, for example. This error occurs during normal usage of Appway; it can just mean that another user was working on the same process you were working on, and has completed that process. So it's not really an error: it's just part of how Appway works.

When thinking about how to redesign error screens, our first idea was that since most errors are not really "errors", but part of normal Appway operations, we should just forward the user to the home screen when that situation occurs.

As a way of testing that concept, we implemented just such an error screen on Wire, our internal staff platform.

When something went wrong on Wire, we simply forwarded you to the home screen (or the login screen, if you were not logged in). While that forwarding was taking place, the bird pictured above appeared in your browser window.
Testing this kind of error screen on Wire showed that there were a few issues with that approach.

What if it's actually a serious error, like the system having run out of storage space? You might want to know about this before you do a lot of work that Appway won't be able to save!
The error screen looks kind of uninviting (there's a dead bird!)
The screen doesn't really tell you what went wrong

The first point caused us to think about whether we can differentiate between "dangerous" errors and "benign" errors.

The second and third points caused us to reevaluate how to design the "benign" error screen.

Let's talk about differentiation first.

Differentiating between errors
You can largely put errors that happen in an Appway system into two different categories. Errors can occur as part of the normal operation of a solution: They are expected, and mostly benign. But errors can also occur because something unexpected has happened: a problem with the server hardware, a bug in the software, and so on.

We discussed this internally to try discover a better approach, and decided that there are (at least) two very different categories of errors: "hard" errors and "soft" errors.

"Hard" and "soft" are pretty vague terms. In the end, we decided to call "hard" errors "technical errors", and "soft" errors "business errors". While these names aren't perfect, they at least provide a basic indication of what kind of error the user is facing.

Technical ("hard") errors: Technical errors occur on the server side and are usually caused by a bug in Appway (web application), a bug in the solution implemented with Appway (model), incorrect configuration or installation, or an infrastructure problem. Most uncaught exceptions fall into this category. Appway may not be able to recover without a system administrator manually intervening.

Example errors: out-of-memory errors, I/O errors, uncaught exceptions in Appway code (bugs), a required extension is not running, etc.

Business ("soft") errors: Business errors occur, at least partially, on the client side. They are often the result of certain actions taken by the current user, or of issues in the communication between the client browser and the server.

Typical issues in this category include "process token not found" (maybe a wrong bookmark), "session has expired", or "access token mismatch".

Getting a technical error means that something has really gone wrong. The user has to be alerted, and possibly take steps to fix the problem.

Getting a business error means that Appway can recover on its own, and - in most cases - no action is required from the user.

More detailed information is available in our "Error pages in Appway" documentation.

Designing the Error Screens
Now that we had these two error screens, we needed to make sure the visual design reflected our intentions.
Both types of error screen should be friendlier than what Appway previously showed you. Nevertheless, the technical error screen should alert you to the fact that something is not functioning correctly.

The technical error screen stops you. You have to acknowledge it before you can continue.

The business error screen, on the other hand, does not stop you. If you don't do anything, it forwards you to the home screen (usually the portal or login screen, depending on whether you're logged in).

The user does, however, have the option of clicking "Cancel". Clicking this button shows additional information about the error:

There's no getting around it: Errors happen. Every application has bugs, or states that the developer didn't foresee. How applications handle these errors is part of their user experience.

Does the application clearly explain what happened, and what the user can do to recover from the problem? If there's a way the application can recover automatically, does it do so? How are the errors worded? Do the error messages blame users for problems ("you've entered an invalid link"), or does the messages communicate details of the error in a more friendly manner?

With this change, Appway is taking the first step towards a much more user-friendly way of handling errors. It won't be the last.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.16

Published May 23, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

Workspace

Appway 6.2.16 is a very small patch release now available for download. It contains 3 bugfixes related to the Workspace, one change, and one new feature.

The three bugfixes in this release are all related to issues introduced in Appway 6.2.14 or 6.2.15.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.15 to 6.2.16.

For more detailed information, please see the Appway 6.2.16 Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.15

Published May 13, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

The latest patch release for Appway 6.2 is now available for download: Appway 6.2.15.

Appway 6.2.15 includes 1 new feature, 3 changes and 20 bug fixes.

JavaScript and CSS file minification
The highlight of this release is an optimization for the Workspace: JavaScript and CSS files previously included in the HTML head are now merged, minified, and sent to the browser with correct cache control instructions. The browser now has to make only one request for the JavaScript code and one for the CSS code, and is then allowed to cache this content forever.

IMPORTANT: In order to benefit the most from this new feature in Appway 6.2.15, you need to install the latest version of the ComponentExtension: version 6.2.19 or later.
Note: This new extension version is not backward compatible! Do not try to install it on an older version of Appway. It will not run.

Process Instance Persistence
Another important change is a fix for a bug related to persistence of process instances. The fix ensures that the modification time for a process instance is set to a value greater than the save time when a process instance is updated. Not doing so could have led to lost updates on a process instance when the process instance was updated twice within one millisecond.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.13 to 6.2.15.

When upgrading, please go directly from 6.2.13 to 6.2.15. Do not install 6.2.14.

For more detailed information, please see the Appway 6.2.14 Patch Release Notes (PDF) and the Appway 6.2.15 Patch Release Notes (PDF).

Workspace Design Notes #16: Don't Design per Device

Published May 2, 2016 by Lukas Mathis

Appway Concepts

Screen Layout

Screen Design

In my previous blog post, I talked about why Appway wants to avoid mobile versions of solutions, and mobile-only (or desktop-only) features in solutions.

Here are some of the questions I'm often asked:

How does the Workspace adapt itself to different devices?
How does the Workspace detect what kind of device it runs on?
What kinds of devices does the Workspace support?
Will Appway update the Workspace to support new devices in the future?

The answer to all of these questions? "The Workspace does not care about devices."

Neutrality and Adaptability
The Appway Workspace does not detect specific devices; it works with all devices that support HTML standards, past, present, and future.

Detecting devices is problematic, because it limits us to supporting a specific set of devices. At the same time, it increases our workload: We'd be creating multiple versions of our solutions, one for every device we want to support. There's the Android phone version, and the Android tablet version, and the desktop version, and the iPhone version, and the iPad version… and so on. And when next year's devices come out, we'd have to start from scratch, because we'd need to support them, too.

We don't want to do that.

So Appway does not really care whether you have an iPhone 6, or an Android phone, or a desktop PC, or a notebook running Chrome OS, or even a device that doesn't yet exist and that your time-travelling friend brought back from the future.

Let's talk about what Appway does instead.

Appway works with all devices, past, present, and future, because it doesn't care about devices at all.
Instead, Appway cares about features.

What kinds of features we detect
Instead of detecting devices, we detect features. This means that the individual device the user uses doesn't matter. If Firefox takes over the world tomorrow, and we all use phones running Firefox OS (they exist, look it up), Appway will be just fine. A user using Firefox OS will open an Appway solution, Appway will check which features that device supports, and will adapt the solution to match that specific device — even though it has never seen anything like that device before.

So what kinds of features does Appway detect?

Screen Size
This is the feature with the biggest impact on how a solution works. Importantly, we don't put screen sizes into categories. There are no "small screen" and "big screen" versions of Appway. Appway looks at the specific size of the device's screen, and makes sure that the screen is used as efficiently as possible.

Touchscreen
If the device has a touchscreen, we increase the size of some on-screen elements. Here's an example showing a redesigned Searchable Dropdown component.

The image on the left shows the version used when pointing devices (such as mouses, trackballs or touchpads) drive input. The image in the middle shows the same version on a touchscreen device. If the touchscreen device has such a small screen that the dropdown takes up a sizeable amount of the screen, the solution switches to a full-screen view, shown on the right.

Location Services, etc.
Location services are usually associated with mobile devices, but a lot of desktop browsers now support them, too. There are other similar, smaller features that we can detect individually, and support on all devices that provide them.

Why you shouldn't detect devices in solutions
So Appway doesn't detect devices. While we encourage you to follow our lead and choose not to detect devices in solutions, we also know that we can't prevent you from doing it. However, to emphasize the reasons behind our choice, here are a few additional reasons why you should not detect devices in solutions.

1. It's not secure

A typical line of thinking goes something like this:

People use tablets when they're on the go
This means that they use tablets when they're at clients, outside of our offices
Therefore, we limit what tablets can do in order to prevent security problems

This is a terrible idea. It is trivial for an iPad browser to pretend to be a desktop browser. Device detection is not secure, and should never be used as any kind of security feature.

2. It's not future-compatible

Right now, maybe you're creating a solution for a bank that only has iPads. So it's fine to target that specific device, right? It only has one screen size! Makes it much easier!

Actually, that won't work. Even assuming that the bank sticks with iPads, what if they get some iPad Pros next year? Well, now you have a different screen size to deal with. What if they update to iOS 9, and everybody starts using split-screen multitasking? Suddenly the amount of screen space your solution has access to is much smaller!

Targeting a specific device works this week. It stops working as soon as people start updating the device, get replacement devices, or migrate to a different platform. It's short-term thinking.

3. People don't want it

Perhaps most importantly, people don't want device-specific solutions. In the 2014 Salesforce Mobile Behavior Report, people were asked how important it was for them to get access to content any way they wanted it, and how important a seamless experience across multiple devices was.

Here are the results:

People do not want solutions to be segregated by devices. An overwhelming majority want solutions to work seamlessly across all devices.

The Appway philosophy is: "Do not create different versions of your solution for different devices. Create one solution that works seamlessly across different devices, and allow users to pick the devices they want."

More Workspace ideas, recommendations and guidance can be found in "Workspace Design Notes: The Collected Series".

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"Time travel" image courtesy Steven Guzzardi/Flickr
Salesforce graphic reproduced with permission

Be More Productive with Appway: The "Shift" Edition

Published April 25, 2016 by Cate

Building on the tips and tricks provided in the four previous editions of the "Be More Productive" posts, this week's blog focuses on less-well known capabilities of the "Shift" key within the Appway Studio.

There are not many shortcuts that rely on the "Shift" key because the "Shift" key is often used when capitalizing letters, or to access symbols on a keyboard. Triggering a shortcut using the "Shift" key could very quickly get frustrating when you simply want to type plain text into a Text Box, for example.

Here are a couple of examples, however, where the "Shift" key could help.

Process Editor: Connection Type
The Process Editor is one place where pressing the "Shift" key can help boost your efficiency. Simply hold "Shift" when drawing a connection between two items in the process and the connection will automatically turn into a "Default" connection.

Similarly, if you press "Ctrl" when drawing a connection, that connection is automatically turned into a "Conditional" connection.

Validation
Appway has sophisticated validation for the majority of all Business Objects. Appway strongly recommends regularly validating all Business Objects to ensure they are error-free. This can be done via the the Administration section (multiple Business Objects) or on an individual Business Object level in the corresponding Studio Editor.

From Appway 6.3 onwards, the combination of "Shift"+"Ctrl" + "V" triggers validation for you in the following Editors:

Process Editor
Screen Editor
Data Class Editor
Script Function Editor (Interactive Script Editor)
PDF Output and PDF Output Table Editors
Rule Editor
Catalog Editor
Integration Link Editor

PDF Output Editor: Height/Width
The arrow keys on your keyboard can be used to move highlighted fields up and down, left and right . But when used in combination with the "Shift" key, the arrow keys can then be used to adjust the width and height of a field.

For a list of shortcut keys that can be used in the Appway Studio, see: Shortcut Keys in Business Object Editors

In case you missed them:
#1 Three Ways to be More Productive in the Appway Studio
#2 Three More Ways
#3 The "ALT" Edition
#4 The "CTRL" Edition
#5 The "Shift" Edition
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Lightbulb image courtesy Brian Talbot / Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.3

Published April 18, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

Extensions

The latest patch release of Appway 6.3 is available: Appway 6.3.3.

It includes 4 new features, 14 changes and 32 bug fixes.

Here are a couple of the items addressed in this release:

Cluster: Quartz Job
The workflow token lookup cache is now kept warm by means of a Quartz job which periodically creates a snapshot of the locally owned process instances, and publishes it to a Hazelcast topic in order to synchronize the caches of the other nodes in the cluster.

Job Scheduler
The Job Scheduler table now shows information for scheduled jobs per cluster node. It is also possible to pause/resume and trigger jobs selectively on a specific node or on all nodes in the cluster.

New System Health Sensor
New system-health sensor "Job Scheduler State" checks if the job schedulers are in identical state on all nodes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.3.2 to 6.3.3.

For more detailed information, please see the Appway 6.3.3 Patch Release Notes (PDF).

New versions of the following extensions are also available:

ActionsExtension 3.0.1
ComponentExtension 6.3.5
WebServices 2.3.28
WorkspaceCollaboration 2.0.1

Appway 6.3 Upgrade Training

Published April 11, 2016 by n/A

Appway 6.3 Upgrade training is a half-day course that covers the features new with Appway 6.3, explains the impact these features have on development, and discusses information and procedures regarding an upgrade to 6.3.

Together with our trainers you will explore the new features found in the 6.3 release, and learn how to handle elements deprecated from 6.2. You will also take a look at how to upgrade an Appway installation from 6.2 to 6.3.

Furthermore, your trainer will discuss the new Screen Components and the newly-designed "Error page" screens found in this release. You'll also find out about the improvements made to the Cluster, and how to migrate to Appway 6.3 from previous versions of Appway.

The course involves hands-on exercises on the major topics covered – not just theory.

Participants are required to have already attended Fundamental training, and have experience with previous releases of Appway.

The next training session takes place in Zurich on May 27th, 2016.

For more information and to register, please visit the dedicated training page.

Patch Release: Appway 6.3.2

Published April 4, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

PDF Rendering

We're happy to announce that Appway 6.3.2 is now available for download. It contains 1 new feature, 4 changes and 21 bug fixes in the core.

Version 6.3.4 of the ComponentExtension has also been released. This version contains 1 new feature, 1 change and 5 bug fixes.

Highlights of this release include:

Text Editor [CK]
We have upgraded the 3rd party JavaScript library "CK Editor" used to implement the Text Editor screen component. This solves several browser compatibility bugs we have seen with this component.

Workspace
Appway now always generates a Viewport definition for every screen. This improves the user experience when accessing an Appway solution from a mobile device.

IMPORTANT: PDF Rendering
Appway now sets the current translation language to the text language defined in the PDF document action or PDF render configuration when rendering a PDF Output. This fixes issues we have seen when using catalogs with a translation filter. Previously, the labels in such a catalog have been translated based on the current user's translation language, completely ignoring the text language defined by the Appway developer. As a result, labels have been translated to different languages depending on how they have been referenced from within the PDF Output or PDF Output Table business object. The new behavior is now consistent with all language-related features of PDF generation in Appway.

However, this change may also have an effect on the format of dates in PDF documents.

If you did not specify a format explicitly, the PDF renderer may have selected a date format based on the current user's translation language. The user's translation language could be different from the language of the PDF Output Business Object, and different from the language specified as "text language" in the PDF document action or PDF render configuration.

As a result, different users may have seen dates printed in different formats for the same PDF Output. After this change, the date format selected by Appway always depends on the text language you have specified in the PDF document action, or PDF render configuration. This leads to a consistent result, no matter which user is printing a PDF document.

This change does not have any impact on single-language solutions, or in cases where the date format is explicitly defined when printing dates on PDF documents (e.g. with the function "DATEFORMAT").

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No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.3.1 to 6.3.2.

For more comprehensive information, please consult the Appway 6.3.2 Release Notes (PDF).

Appway Native Workspace: A Layered Architecture

Published March 27, 2016 by Aurelian Briner

Application Design

Appway Concepts

System Architecture

From laptop to tablet to smartphone: people use all types of devices in all kind of situations. Appway supports device flexibility and believes that developers shouldn’t be forced to create a separate, mobile version of their solution.

Even though web technologies on mobile devices are progressing quickly, they still lag behind their desktop counterparts. Specifically, the integration between mobile browsers and a device's native features such as the camera, push notifications, and location services leaves a lot to be desired. Taking into consideration that the attention span of mobile users is short, any unnecessary step or lag in performance reduces acceptance, retention, and efficiency.

The key is to deliver a mobile experience which people expect and know: This means that native still matters on mobile. With the Native Workspace, Appway unites web and native elements to provide excellent user experience and ensure enterprise security standards.

Layered architecture
The Native Workspace adds two additional layers to your existing Appway solution model. The secure core layer isolates your solution from the mobile device, and coordinates features such as access to the device's camera and location. It also adds functionality like secure push notifications, encryption of data, cache prevention, and integration with third-party security providers.

Additionally, a mobile layer is added on top of the existing solution, seamlessly replacing built-in Appway components with native user interfaces. Users get access to native interaction designs without Appway developers having to change their existing solutions.

Join us for our webinar to learn more about the Appway Native Workspace.

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) 3.3 Now Available!

Published March 14, 2016 by Laura Monetti

BAM

We’re happy to announce the launch of BAM version 3.3 for Appway 6.3.

Two major highlights from this latest Appway BAM extension release are the new "Team" dashboard, and new "due date" functionality. For a comprehensive list of new and updated features, please see the full release notes (PDF).

New features in BAM 3.3:

Team dashboard
The BAM dashboards now include a new view on BAM data. In the new dashboard, process activities are grouped according to which team owns that activity. This allows a manager to browse the Active, Completed and Cancelled activities by team, and to check the number of expired and on-time activities for a team.

This view was previously only available at the level of an individual user, and has now been expanded to allow managers to easily extract team-level statistics.

Due Date support
It is now possible to store the due date field of activities in the BAM database, and then use that date in the dashboards for monitoring, filtering and aggregation purposes. By setting a due date on an activity, users can specify a "dynamic" expiration of the activity. The due date can vary from one instance to another.

In addition, while SLAs can only be set as an amount of time starting from the creation of the activity (e.g. "3 hours"), the due date can be a specific date and time (e.g. "Wednesday March 2nd, 3pm"). The due date can be used in addition to, or instead of, the SLA for each activity.

While previous versions of BAM required all activities of the same type to be subject to the same SLA, this new functionality allows you to add an extra level of granularity to your monitoring activities.

Information about how to upgrade from BAM 3.2 to BAM 3.3 can be found in our BAM Migration Guide.

Announcing Appway 6.3

Published March 7, 2016 by Nina Schneider

Wednesday, March 2 marked the official release of Appway 6.3.

Appway 6.3 sees a significant increase in overall user experience, and makes it easier to work in parallel when developing in the Appway Studio. Workspace user experience has also been improved with the introduction of new error guidance screens, while two reworked components greatly enhance the experience on mobile devices.

This release introduces the Business Object Diff Viewer, a tool to greatly facilitate parallel development. Business Object editors have also been enhanced to allow for user customization. Specific screen components have had their cross-platform responsiveness improved, and we have also introduced a series of fixes and enhancements focusing on system performance.

Comprehensive Release Notes for Appway 6.3 cover the changes and new features found in the release. A system upgrade guide (Appway 6.2 to 6.3) is available to help you upgrade your Appway installation.

Here's a summary of the five major topics we'd like to highlight.

Business Object Diff Viewer
The Diff Viewer is a new feature available in the Appway Studio. It lets you easily compare two versions of any Business Object, and view any differences between them. This new feature greatly enhances the capabilities of a development team when performing parallel development in the Appway Studio. The Diff Viewer presents the elements of the two compared Business Objects in clearly-defined groups such as Business Object Properties, Variables, and Scripts. It also visually indicates changes to the text and script, letting you quickly navigate from one change to the next.

Find out more by reading the Business Object Diff Viewer documentation.

Error Guidance Screens
Appway 6.3 uses a new mechanism for displaying screens that provide you with guidance in case something unexpected happens. The screens provide a clear explanation about what has occurred, and clear instructions on how to get back on track. You can also create your own custom error screens.

Find out about the different kind of error screens, how Appway decides which error screen to render, and how to create your own custom error pages in the Error Pages in Appway documentation.

Improved Dropdown List and Date Picker Components
The new Dropdown List and Date Picker components offer enhanced usability, especially on mobile devices. They are now easier to configure and fully responsive, regardless of screen size.

Dropdown List
The Dropdown List for Appway 6.3 is a responsive component which adapts to any screen size and supports various input types like mouse, keyboard, or gestures. More information about the component can be found in the Screen Component: Dropdown List documentation.

You can either migrate the Dropdown List with the help of the Migration Module in the Appway Studio, or perform this migration manually. The Migration of the Dropdown List document outlines the steps to follow to migrate the component from an older installation to Appway 6.3.

Date Picker
The Date Picker is a Screen Component that renders an input field for choosing a date. It provides a pop-up with a calendar to pick a date from and makes it easy for the user to enter the right value. More information about the component can be found in the Screen Component: Date Picker documentation.

You can either migrate the Date Picker with the help of the Migration Module in the Appway Studio, or perform this migration manually. The Migration of the Date Picker document outlines the steps to follow to migrate the component from an older installation to Appway 6.3.

Business Object Editor Enhancements
From a clean, flat design to clear notifications when you are working in read-only mode, we've included some visual improvements to the Business Object editors. But we've also made sure to deliver functional improvements as well: common operations can be performed using new shortcut keys, and you can now adjust the various regions of the editors according to your preference.

Cluster Enhancements
Appway 6.3 introduces a series of cluster-related enhancements and fixes that are reflected in such areas as improved performance, reduced resource consumption, faster system startup, and improved logging.

Querying of process messages no longer requires executing a distributed query, for example. Having an index to answer queries over process messages speeds up response times and saves computing resources. Find out more in the Process Messages Indexing documentation.

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Training
Our Appway 6.3 Upgrade training is now open for registration. Held in Zürich on Thursday, March 24 2016, this half-day course covers the features new with Appway 6.3, explains the impact these features have on development, and discusses information and procedures regarding an upgrade to 6.3.

If you have any questions regarding any of the topics covered in this post, please do not hesitate to contact Appway Support.

Feature in Focus: Script Functions

Published February 28, 2016 by Cate

Script Functions

A function is a portion of code within a larger program, which performs a specific task and is relatively independent from the remaining code.

Before you can use a script function to do something, you first need to create it. Our short video tutorial, "Create a Script Function" runs through the basics of how to create a script function. It covers managing its parameters and return values, and how to use it in other Business Objects.

It may not always be necessary, however, to create your own script function: the Appway script language has a collection of built-in functions which can be found here:

Once you have your script functions in your solution, it would be great to be able to use them as validators in Screens. Our recipe, "Building a Script Function Validator" provides you with a three-step guide on how to do just that. The advantage of the Script Function validator over a Condition validator is that it is less complex to configure — and it forces you to externalize the validation logic into a script function, making it easier to maintain.

Now you've decided to upgrade your solution to a new version of Appway: How can you make sure all the functions will continue to work? Advice can be found in our recipe, "Comparing functions across Appway installations". When comparing your Appway version with an upgrade, make sure that the environments being compared are as similar as possible.

Which script function do you find to be the most useful in your solution?

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Image courtesy Todd Chandler/Flickr

Contribute to the Cookbook!

Published February 22, 2016 by Cate

Script Language

Screen Design

The Appway Cookbook contains over 240 recipes filled with useful tips, tricks and guidance. Recipes cover a wide range of themes, from choosing which Screen components best fit your use case, to script functions, to upgrading. What have you been cooking up with Appway? We'd love to hear about it!

Everyone is encouraged to write and share their own recipes — community member Murray added his own contribution to the Cookbook on his team's best practices when it came to scripting. It's proved to be a popular recipe, with over 400 views - and is in joint second place when it comes to being marked as "useful" by the community. Thanks, Murray!

Roy, who works for our Marketing department, shared best practice when it comes to designing emails in Appway, while Professional Services team member Carmine wrote about analyzing and reducing HTTP payload requests.

Recipes are a great way of sharing what you've learnt while working with Appway, and give other members of the Appway Developer Community a taste of what can be done.

Simply sign in to get started!

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Image courtesy Paul D'Ambra / Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.13

Published February 15, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

We're happy to announce that Appway 6.2.13 is now available. This patch release contains 4 changes and 20 bugfixes.

The highlights of this release are:

A fix preventing the "loss" of log entries in the cluster log
The Data Table displaying SVG icons correctly when using IE9 and IE10
A fix for synchronization issues (potential deadlock) when using the functions for application cache management (CacheStore, CacheClear, CacheRemove, etc.).

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.12 to 6.2.13.

More information can be found in the Appway 6.2.13 release notes (PDF).

UPDATE: Appway 6.2.13-p1 was released 17 February 2016 to fix a small bug introduced in the 6.2.13 release.

Patch Release: Appway 5.3.19

Published February 14, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

It's time to announce the latest patch release for Appway 5.3: Appway 5.3.19 is now available for download.

This release contains 5 bugfixes, targeting integration link and synchronization issues.

These include a fix for integration links resetting the version filter, and a fix for synchronization issues (potential deadlock) when using the functions for application cache management (CacheStore, CacheClear, CacheRemove, etc.).

No special action is required when upgrading from 5.3.18 to 5.3.19.

More information can be found in the Appway 5.3.19 Release Notes (PDF).

Load Testing: Investing for the Future

Published February 8, 2016 by Cate

Testing

Projects usually have multiple stakeholders, ranging from management through to end users and those responsible for maintaining the solution’s infrastructure.

What all these stakeholders have in common: They need an efficient and reliable system. What does this mean? It means a system with snappy responses, no downtime and one optimized for the load in production.

Functional testing, such as user acceptance testing, has become so ingrained that it’s recognizable from its "UAT" acronym. UAT is an established practice and regularly built into release planning. Performance and load testing, on the other hand, have not yet reached the same level of recognition and adoption.

What is Load Testing?
The term "load testing" is usually defined as the process of exercising the system under test to see how well it operates under expected conditions. Load testing does not aim to break the system by overwhelming it, but instead "tries to keep the system constantly humming like a well-oiled machine."

The goal of load testing is to verify whether the system can sustain the estimated load of a specific number of users performing a specific number of tasks in a given period of time. It helps you determine whether your infrastructure is large enough, and measure how many users can be handled before the system is overloaded.

As a consequence of running load tests, you are better able to identify issues with the solution design, and discover bottlenecks or other issues relating to the infrastructure. Being aware of these before going into production gives you the opportunity to improve and optimize the solution before release.

An Investment for the Long Run
Load testing is an investment in terms of time and effort that pays off in the long term. It’s a preventative measure that reduces costly errors in production that make your stakeholders unhappy: downtime, impacting your end users’ efficiency; errors requiring system administrators to work overtime…

Testing requires accuracy and consistency. As testing progresses, make sure to document all aspects of it, from the initial infrastructure configuration, to how the tests progressed, to the actual test results. Document the necessary fixes as well. Good test documentation is required to achieve reproducible and trustworthy results — and also helps to cut down on future testing overhead. Load testing isn’t a one-off activity: it should be a continuous effort to ensure that new releases continue to perform at an optimal level.

To read more about load testing on solutions built with the Appway platform, try our documentation on "Performing Load Testing on a Solution". Appway’s Solution Engineers can also advise you on setting up your load testing initiative and provide guidance regarding testing best practice.

Cluster Training: Nodes and Know-how

Published February 1, 2016 by n/A

System Architecture

Appway Academy's one-day expert training course provides participants with an in-depth understanding of the Appway cluster.

You'll learn about the architecture of the cluster, memory layers, and cluster startup and shutdown operations. Furthermore, you'll also discover best practice when developing cluster solutions and cluster-based extensions. Practical exercises mixed with theory ensure seamless real-world application, with knowledgeable staff on hand to answer any questions you may have.

The next session takes place in Zurich on Wednesday, February 24. To register, visit the Cluster Training page.

Participants are expected to have already successfully completed Appway Developer training, and if possible, Appway Administrator training.

As background reading, why not try:
System Migration: Single-node to multi-node
Cluster-wide Logging in Appway

Workspace Design Notes #15: Why the Flow Bar is at the Bottom

Published January 25, 2016 by Lukas Mathis

When you're in an Appway process, you have a set of buttons that are common across different screens. Usually, this set includes at least a "next" and "back" button. People interact with those buttons a lot, whether they are going through a process for the first time, filling in forms, or browsing through an existing process, reviewing data and making changes.

To accommodate the two use cases - entering data, and browsing through existing processes - early Appway solutions often repeated these buttons. They had a set of "next" and "back" buttons at the top of the screen (for browsing), and another set at the end of the screen (for filling in screens; once the user reaches the end of the screen, the buttons scroll into view).

This solution causes problems, though. Users are often confused when the same buttons are shown repeatedly, since it's not immediately obvious if there is a functional difference between the two sets of "next" and "back" buttons. Having buttons scroll means that once you're halfway through a screen, you can't navigate to the next screen, or go back to wherever you were previously in the process: You need to either scroll all the way back up to the top, or all the way down to the bottom of the screen.

Learning from this, we wanted to make the buttons visible at all times, and also make them a prominent part of the visual layout. This setup would provide a visual clue to people that they were looking at a Process screen.

Once we'd made that decision, the question became, "Where to put the buttons?" We had two choices: We could either put them at the top of a screen, near the chevron; or at the bottom, below the content.

As you already know, we chose to place the buttons at the bottom.

The interaction flow
People fill in forms from top to bottom. Once they reach the end of a form, the final thing they need to do is to move to the next screen in the Process. So it makes sense to have the "next" button be the last thing on a page; when you fill a form from top to bottom, you naturally finish looking at the bottom of the screen.

The bottom corners are the most reachable areas on touchscreens
Whether on a smartphone or tablet, with a one-handed or two-handed grip: the corners at the bottom of the touchscreen are where it's easiest to reach.

Let's start with smartphones.

The most common way of holding mobile phones is the one-handed, thumb-controlled style. In this style, the bottom-right area of the screen is most easily reachable. Particularly on larger phones (or for people with smaller hands), the top area of the phone is not reachable without contorting your hands… or is simply not reachable at all.

You can see this in the illustration below: If someone is holding their phone in their right hand, the red areas are easily reachable, and the orange ones somewhat easily reachable.

Note: For people holding their phone in their left hand, the reachable areas are mirrored horizontally.

Another common style, particularly for large phones or for those with small hands, is the two-handed hold. This hold makes the bottom and middle areas of the phone easily reachable.

Finally, some people hold the phone in one hand, and point with the other. This makes most of the screen easily reachable, save for the topmost edge (we'll see why in the next section).

Similar results are found when looking at tablets.

There are two popular ways of interacting with tablets. The first is the two-handed grip, which uses the thumbs for interaction. This style makes the middle and bottom areas of the left and right edges of the screen easily reachable.

The other style is to hold the device with one hand, and point with the other. This makes most of the screen easily reachable.

Some tablets are used docked to a keyboard. Depending on the keyboard, this can make the bottom edge of the screen slightly harder to reach, particularly if the keyboard is attached very close to the screen (as is the case with the Microsoft Surface Pro 3, for example). For these devices, things near the right edge are easiest to reach for right-handed people.

So we've now looked at a couple of different possibilities and hopefully the pattern has become clear:

One thing most of these devices have in common is that the bottom left and bottom right of the screen are either in the red "easily reachable" area, or still in the orange "somewhat reachable" area. This makes putting the Flow Bar at the bottom of the screen the best option.

Look up top, interact below
In the previous section I mentioned that the upper sections of a touchscreen are problematic even when people can move their pointing finger freely. The reason? You don't want to cover your screen with your hands while interacting with it.

Take a look at these devices.

Even though these are all very different kinds of devices, they have one thing in common: they put screens at the top, and buttons at the bottom. In other words, you look at the top of the device, and interact with the bottom of the device.

You want to be able to see what the device is doing when interacting with it. If these two sections were reversed, you'd be covering the screen whilst interacting with the device.

Yes, this is arguably less important for mouse-driven systems since the pointing device, the mouse cursor, doesn't cover much of the screen. But the "information top, interaction bottom" rule holds for touchscreen interaction design: When designing user interfaces that run, or could be run, on touchscreen devices, put informative elements at the top, and interactive elements at the bottom. This way, the user won't cover informative elements when interacting with the interface.

On a side note, this is why the Chevron is at the top of the screen. It's informative; it tells you where you are. The "next" and "back" buttons, meanwhile, are interactive. They don't tell you much, but you do use them often. That's why they are at the bottom. The actual form (something that both shows information to the user, but also needs to be interacted with sometimes) is in the middle.

Stacked Controls
One issue with putting the Flow Bar at the bottom is that most touchscreen devices already have a set of buttons at the bottom. Android puts the "back", "home", and "app switcher" buttons at the bottom. On iOS, you have Safari's buttons at the bottom of the screen.

I don't see this is a big problem. Stacked buttons at the bottom of screens are pretty common on mobile devices, and if there is a small non-interactive margin between the two sets of buttons, it's unlikely that people accidentally hit the wrong buttons.

Appway's native app removes Safari's browser controls, putting the Flow Bar at the very bottom of the screen on iOS devices.

Tablets with Keyboards
There are use cases where putting the Flow Bar at the bottom is not optimal. For example, if your users are mainly interacting with the UI using tablets with keyboards, the bottom screen edge might not be easily reachable because it's close to the keyboard hinge, and may even be slightly obstructed by it.

One option to alleviate this issue would be to map "next" and "back" to keys on the keyboard using the Shortcut component. That way, people could use the keyboard to navigate through processes, and wouldn't have to touch the screen at all.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.12

Published January 18, 2016 by Stephan Markwalder

We're happy to announce the release of Appway 6.2.12, a patch release containing 7 features, 3 changes and 24 bugfixes.

The two major highlights of this release are:

Configuration: New system health sensors comparing the configuration of all running cluster nodes (same configuration properties, same extensions, same log4j configuration, etc.).
Performance: New/updated functions for getting a filtered list of users, user IDs or process instance IDs based on a distributed search.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.11 to 6.2.12.

More information can be found in the Appway 6.2.12 release notes (PDF).

Be More Productive with Appway: The "CTRL" Edition

Published January 11, 2016 by Cate

Studio

The previous post in this series looked at three shortcuts and tricks available through using the ALT key. This post focuses on three less well-known uses of the CTRL key.

Open a Script Editor

In the various Editors' Properties panels, you can use CTRL-E to open a Script Editor after clicking into a Script field.

The "Multiple Clipboards" widget
There's a hidden multiple clipboards widget at "/admin/clipboard/clipboard.jsp". This widget can be opened from the Library using the combination CTRL-Shift-C. This feature only works within the Library section of the Studio: it doesn't work from other areas of the Studio.

Duplicate elements

In the Process Editor and the PDF Output Editor, CTRL-D duplicates the highlighted elements to speed up designing and editing work.

For a list of shortcut keys that can be used in the Appway Studio, see: Shortcut Keys in Business Object Editors
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In case you missed them:
#1 Three Ways to be More Productive in the Appway Studio
#2 Three More Ways
#3 The ALT Edition
#4 The "CTRL" Edition
#5 The "SHIFT" Edition
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Image courtesy Brian Talbot / Flickr

Happy New Year from Appway!

Published December 28, 2015 by Cate

To all of our community members celebrating the arrival of 2016 — a very happy new year from the Appway Developer team! Thank you for being part of our journey, and contributing your questions, answers, feedback and recipes to help out other developer.appway.com users. It was especially nice to meet so many people at Appway Sphere earlier this year!

We are hard at work planning and developing new features for the Developer Community throughout 2016, and look forward to sharing these with you in the coming year.

So make sure to come back regularly to discover what we've been up to, and share your ideas and successes with other community members!

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Image courtesy Mike Bitzenhofer / Flickr

Appway Developer: Best of 2015

Published December 21, 2015 by Cate

Screen Design

Appway Concepts

This year has been a busy year on Appway Developer — from the great recipes and documentation produced, to following the informative discussions in the Forum, we hope there was something useful for everyone.

See what we think are some highlights of 2015 below: What content would you recommend to members of the Developer Community?

Community
We've had the honor of welcoming over 160 new members to the Developer Community since January 2015! Our Academy delivered 279 days of training to over 750 trainees, and expanded the courses to include 6.2 Upgrade and Screen Design trainings. The Academy also worked hard on expanding the "expert" offering, with more scheduled for 2016.

Cookbook
Our cookbook is bursting with recipes! We've published 40 new recipes this year, covering a wide variety of topics. While the five most popular recipes (listed below) cover aspects of Screen design, members of the Developer Community have also been busy cooking up great content on writing cleaner code, designing emails, and executing long-running scripts in parallel, to name a few.

Here are the top five recipes for 2015:

Blog
We continued to post great short-form content on our blog this year, the highlight being L. Mathis's 14-part series on Workspace Design. Covering various aspects of the decisions behind why the Workspace in Appway 6 looks the way it does, one post in particular got much more attention than the others: Note #6, on "Why There is (Almost) no Drag and Drop". This Note looks at the three main reasons why we've made the decision to avoid drag and drop interactions whenever possible — and why you should too.

A summary of the series so far, and a PDF of all Notes available for download, can be found in "Workspace Design Notes: The Collected Series".

We also ran features on Studio access and administration, data management and integration links, and continued posting a couple more ideas from the team about how to be more productive using Appway.

Documentation
We published documentation on many topics over the course of 2015, and have much more on the way for next year. We highly recommend reading through all the following pieces — but if you've only got time for one, we'd suggest "Web Services".

Web Services
Web Services are generally used to integrate with a third-party application. The two industry-standard Web Service types are Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST). The Web Services extension can act as a client for both.

Workspace Design for Appway 6.2
Appway 6.2 saw the introduction of a new Workspace design, and a number of new Screen components. This document explains how to use the new Screen components, and how to easily achieve good-looking screens along with a clean, user-friendly interaction design.

Performing Load Testing on a Solution
The goal of load testing is to verify whether the design of the solution is correct and can sustain the estimated load of a specific number of users performing a specific number of tasks in a given period of time. It is highly recommended that you perform load testing on your solution before you make it available to end users. Load testing assures high reliability and efficiency of the designed solution.

Forum
The Forum is where you can ask questions, get assistance and help others with their Appway solution. There have been over 130 discussions started this year on a wide range of topics. Thank you to every one who got involved and helped out members of the community - both by asking questions, and by answering them.

We hope you value being part of the Developer Community and would love to hear any feedback, suggestions or other ideas you may have!

Guidance and Optimization: Appway Solution Engineering

Published December 14, 2015 by Cate

Whether you are testing your solution, reviewing your design to minimize issues during go-live, or simply need guidance: Appway Solution Engineers are here to support you.

Bring in their expertise at any point of a project to help support your success: include them in the initial phase of your project to ensure an optimal system architecture, or ask for advice on how best to test your Appway solution. Perhaps you would like an overview of the health of your solution, or a check of the security set-up? Drawing on their in-depth technical knowledge of Appway and experience from other projects, the team can provide guidelines and pointers on strengthening your capabilities and advice on how to tackle challenges.

Solution Engineers are also on hand to provide expert coaching and guidance while you investigate specific aspects of your solution, and analyze how innovative new Appway features could benefit you and your users.

Contact your Customer Success Manager to find out more about the skills and services our Solution Engineers can provide.

Feature in Focus: Data Management

Published December 7, 2015 by Cate

Data Management

According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. While an Appway solution generates nowhere near that much data, data management and storage are nevertheless important topics.

A good introduction to the subject is our Data Management document, which discusses how Appway organizes and stores business data. After introducing the concept of data models and data entities, the document then runs through short-term and long-term data storage options.

When running a process, it's rather important to have somewhere to store the relevant data. This could be in a value store, but if longer-term data persistence is required, it's likely you'll rely on a database. Our two-part blog on "Databases and the Future" covers relational database management systems in Part 1, and examines semantic web technology in Part 2.

When it comes to files, the Appway platform offers two ways to store them: as local files or as cluster files. On multi-node Appway installations, the cluster file type ensures that files are accessible on all nodes and remain available if a node fails. For installations running on a single server, using cluster files reduces the effort necessary to upgrade to multiple nodes at a later point in time.

The local file type can be used when a file does not need to be accessible on all nodes. For example, you may want to store a large temporary email attachment in the local file system in order to save memory space.

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Image courtesy Todd Chandler/Flickr

Appway Certification: From Practitioner to Master

Published November 30, 2015 by n/A

Application Design

Process Design

System Maintenance

Use our Academy and online resources to prepare for Appway Certification, a way to prove your knowledge and experience with Appway. Certification allows you to showcase your proficiency with the Appway platform and demonstrate your awareness of key business and development concepts.

There are three certification levels, with an increasing level of difficulty: Practitioner, Professional and Master.

Practitioner
A certified Practitioner can create and modify scripts and data classes, design medium-complexity screens, and has a firm grasp of rules regarding document generation.

If you've completed Fundamental Training and have three months' experience with Appway, take the Practitioner exam to demonstrate what you know.

Note: Practitioner certification is a prerequisite for all Professional-level exams.

Professional (Business Analyst / Developer / Administrator)
Appway Professional certification is split into three streams: Business Analyst, Developer, and Administrator.

Business Analyst certification requires good knowledge of best practices around requirements management for an Appway project, the ability to use the process editor's advanced modeling features, and experience in creating screen and rule mock-ups. Analysts should have 12 months' project experience with Appway.

Developer certification tests your knowledge of advanced process, screen and data model design, and your ability to adapt solutions to technical and business requirements. It also examines your integration experience using the SOAP and REST extensions. Developers should have 12 months' project experience with Appway.

Administrator certification is for experienced Appway Server Administrators. Can you run an Appway environment from the installation phase to the ongoing maintenance phase, taking responsibility for configuration changes, deployments and incident troubleshooting? Then this is the exam for you.

Master
The Appway Master certification program tests problem-solving abilities and knowledge of Appway architecture, components, and extensions. Taken over half a day, the exam includes a presentation and case study.

Are you ready to demonstrate what you can do with Appway?
More information can be found on the Academy page.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.11

Published November 23, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

Extensions

Script Functions

We're happy to announce the release of Appway 6.2.11 — a small patch release with 4 changes, 6 bugfixes and 3 new features.

The highlights of this release are outlined below:

Updated Script Language Function
The script language function "StartProcess" has an additional optional parameter to instruct Appway to only initialize the new process instance (initialize variables and put process tokens on start elements), but not immediately update the instance (move process tokens). This feature may be helpful in cases where a lot of process instances have to be started in a kind of batch job.

Orphaned Value Stores
Cleanup of orphaned value stores is no longer performed during shutdown. There is now a default Cron job running daily, checking if there are any orphaned value stores — but removal of these orphaned value stores is done with a separate specific configuration.

Cluster
A new system health sensor "Unique Properties" checks the configuration to ensure that properties that are supposed to be unique do indeed have a different value on every cluster node.

Staying with the cluster, log messages also now appear more quickly in the cluster log. Log messages are no longer collected "per transaction" and then written on commit, but instead written to the cluster log immediately.

More information can be found in the Appway 6.2.11 release notes (PDF).

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.10 to 6.2.11.
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ComponentExtension 6.2.12

The ComponentExtension version 6.2.12 is also now available. The ComponentExtension release contains 1 change, 1 feature and 2 bugfixes.

DatePicker
Added configuration "ext.componentextension.datepicker.parseMethod" to decide which parse method should be used for the dates.

Flowbar
Deprecated the "Position Automatically At Bottom" property due to possible layout problems on mobile devices.

TabBox
TabStyles.css will be created with an encoding set

Process Image
The Process Image component now gracefully handles process tokens on sub-process activities that do not have a sub-process token set.

Discussions and Solutions: Developer Forum

Published November 16, 2015 by Cate

The Appway Developer Forum is where you can ask questions, discuss best practice and help out other members of the Appway community by sharing your knowledge. Developers and consultants here at Appway, alongside members of the Appway Developer community, provide answers or guidance on whatever issues, problems or questions you may have.

If you've already consulted the technical documentation and Cookbook and still not found your answer, try posting your question in the Forum. Topics are organized by category — from Scripting, to Architecture, to Ask Anything; choose the most appropriate topic and ask away!

Here's a selection of threads from the past couple months:

Martin asked about configuring his application - going beyond using just the "Content configuration" setting in the Admin panel. Alistair provided a great overview of the options available, while Mauro reminded us that storing lots of preferences can take up a lot of memory. He suggested it may be better to add preferences in a data class persisted to the database.

Amey was wondering about a script that provides a (blank) PDF file directly to the user for download. Ste explained that you could reate a script function that can be "called" with an HTTP request. The function would fetch/prepare/generate the PDF document and then stream it to the client. Matteo highlighted using Rules or RuleSets so there would be no need to create an Action object yourself.

Finally, a question came up about the Script Language Function Reference. Bartosz provided an HTML file for functions A - Mo.

You can also post ideas and give feedback to us via the Feedback & Suggestion topic in the Forum. We'd love to hear from you!

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Image courtesy Tim O'Brien / Flickr

Be More Productive with Appway: The "ALT" Edition

Published November 9, 2015 by Cate

Studio

Building on the tips and tricks provided in the two previous "Be More Productive" posts, this week's blog focuses on three hidden capabilites of the "ALT" key within the Appway Studio.

Process Business Objects
It's quite useful to have a complete overview of all Process Business Objects that exist in the Studio. I don't just mean a list of all the current Processes - perhaps you'd also like to see the Processes that have been deleted (accidentally or otherwise!).

To see the list, all you need to do is: Open the Studio, go to the Library, and then click on "Process" while holding down the ALT key.

You'll get a list of all Processes, including the deleted Business objects.

PDF Output Editor
The ALT key provides two "hidden" features in the PDF Output Editor.

First up is field selection: In the Editor, holding down the ALT key means that you can click on fields obscured by other fields.

Second is resizing. When resizing or moving active elements in the Editor using the arrow keys, holding down the ALT key at the same time means that the elements are resized in increments of 10px instead of just 1px.

Highlighting Screen Includes
If you move the mouse cursor over an area of an Appway screen while pressing CTRL-ALT, sections are highlighted as you scroll over them. The name of the include is also displayed (in grey).

Clicking within a highlighted section opens the Screen-Include for that section.

For a list of shortcut keys that can be used in the Appway Studio, see: Shortcut Keys in Business Object Editors

In case you missed them:
#1 Three Ways to be More Productive in the Appway Studio
#2 Three More Ways
#3 The "ALT" Edition
#4 The "CTRL" Edition
#5 The "SHIFT" Edition

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Lightbulb image courtesy Brian Talbot / Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.10

Published November 2, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

We're pleased to announce that Appway 6.2.10 is now available. This patch release contains 12 bugfixes, 2 changes and 2 features.

Highlights of this release include a bugfix for Dropdown List, Checkbox List and Radiobutton List screen components with bindings to variables or properties of type "Integer" or "Long". If the value was greater than 999, it was formatted by Appway internally with grouping separators (e.g. "8,039"). This caused issues when matching the value against the list of IDs provided by a data source.

There is now a Serialization Statistics page in the Appway Studio. This page contains statistical information about object serialization in distributed Hazelcast maps. Please read the Serialization Statistics documentation for more information.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.9 to 6.2.10.

For more information about this release, please see the Appway 6.2.10 Release Notes (PDF).

Workspace Design Notes: The Collected Series

Published October 26, 2015 by Cate

Screen Design

Screen Layout

Screen Structure

The past five months saw the first edition of our Workspace Design Notes appearing on the blog. These Notes talked about various different aspects of the new Workspace design, and introduced the thinking behind some of the changes we’ve made.

The most popular of these Notes is Note #6: "Why There is (Almost) No Drag and Drop". It looks at the main reasons why Appway made the decision to avoid drag and drop interactions whenever possible. If the alternative to drag and drop is to simply offer a button that users can click, choose to use the button: A button is always faster, easier to understand, simpler to use, and more accessible.

Next up are Note #10, part 1 and part 2, which answered the question, "Why Use the Border Layout Manager?" Our Workspace Design documentation contains the instructions, "To create the basic [screen] layout, use the Border Layout Manager." These two posts dive into the details behind that decision, touching on the concepts of hierarchy and relationships.

Another popular Note is #5, "Am I in a Process?" When it comes to screens and user interaction, there's a huge difference between a screen that's part of a process, and one that is not. Users should therefore know when they're in a process, and when they're not. They should know whether they are expected to let themselves be guided by a process, or whether they are expected to make decisions themselves.

Download now available
If you haven't yet read all the posts in the series, you can find them all on the blog – and you can also download the Design Notes as a PDF.

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While our first edition of the Design Notes has come to an end, this doesn’t mean we’re "done". As the Workspace continues to evolve, we feel it’s important to continue with our Design Notes – they will just not be on such a regular basis.

We hope you've enjoyed the series so far. If you have any topics or suggestions you'd like us to cover, please contact developer@appway.com

Workspace Design Notes #14: The Luxury of Space

Published October 19, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Screen Design

Users should trust the applications they use, and visual design is an important tool for building that trust. One visual detail that conveys things like stability and quality and value to people, and thus allows them to build trust, is empty space.

Empty space conveys an impression of efficiency, thoughtfulness and focus. Not sold on the idea? Then let me briefly demonstrate what I mean.

Here are two pictures of clothes stores.

Both pictures show stores selling clothes, but the associations they trigger are very different. Picture 1 shows a store that clearly portrays an air of luxury, quality and high value. Picture 2 is attempting to communicate that the products it sells are cheap, and cheaply made.

Please note that I'm not saying that the store in picture 2 is poorly designed! Both stores are designed really well; they both communicate exactly what they want to communicate. If you're looking for luxury, you're not going to go to the store in picture 2. Similarly, the reverse is also true. Both stores' designs are successful at communicating what they are offering, and align customer expectations with customer experience accordingly.

One way these two stores communicate this is by their use of space: Picture 1 shows a lot of empty space; picture 2 has no empty space.

Appway as a company, and Appway as a product, fall into a similar category to the store in picture 1. Appway is a quality product.

The same use of space that made the store in picture 1 look luxurious, and the store in picture 2 look a little overwhelming, can be used to influence the kinds of associations people make when they use solutions built with Appway.

That's why the new Workspace design uses space liberally. There's a lot of empty space in the new Workspace, we don't put stuff into every nook and cranny, and we have visible margins between elements. All of this is completely intentional.

There's a basic human need to fill empty space with stuff. This need is so common that there's a word for it: Horror Vacui.

"Horror Vacui"
Horror Vacui are one of the reasons why solution engineers often look at the new Workspace design, and come to the conclusion that it needs more stuff. And that's okay. If anything, the new Workspace design erred on the side of making things too spacious, so it's okay to dial that back a little, and add some more stuff.

But always keep in mind what kind of value perception you're generating in your users. The last thing you want to do is add so much stuff that your solution ends up looking like a dollar store or classified ads website.

We want to avoid this not because these websites are "bad", but because we're in a different business, and think a different message should be communicated to users.

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Picture 1 courtesy thinkretail / Flickr
Picture 2 courtesy Brad K / Flickr

Workspace Design Notes #13: Resizing for Touchscreens

Published October 12, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Screen Rendering

You've probably noticed that the new Workspace renders fonts a little bit larger on smaller screens. On a mobile phone, for example, labels are rendered with font size 16px, but on a desktop, they're rendered at 14px.

At first blush, this seems exactly the opposite of what you'd expect. Smaller screens have less space — wouldn't you want to make things smaller, so more stuff fits?

There are two reasons for making things larger.

First, mobile phones already render everything quite a bit smaller.
Second, computer mice are more precise than fingers.

Let's look at each of these reasons in turn.

Reason 1: Mobile phones already render everything quite a bit smaller
If you specify your element sizes in pixels (as we do in the Workspace), the same pixel is going to look quite a bit smaller on your average phone than on your average laptop or desktop PC. Here's the same red square as it is being rendered on my laptop, and on my phone:

As you can see, the red square appears larger on the laptop's screen in the background, compared to the mobile phone's screen.

Increasing the size of elements on smaller screens is intended to counteract this effect. It won't completely make up for it; even though we increase the font size on smaller screens, fonts still appear smaller on your mobile phone than on your desktop or laptop.

Reason 2: Computer mice are more precise than fingers
You've probably noticed this: on your Mac or Windows PC, UI elements like buttons tend to be quite small. By comparison, the same kinds of elements on an iPad or mobile phone are much larger. Why do Apple and other manufacturers do this? Why not make things smaller on smaller screens, in order to fit more on the same screen?

Mainly, it's because you use your Mac or Windows PC with a mouse or a trackpad, but you use your iPad or phone with your finger.

A mouse or trackpad is a precise input device. Your fingers, on the other hand, are very imprecise. It's easier to hit a small target with a mouse than with a finger.

By increasing the size of elements on smaller screens, we're making it easier for people to hit them with their fingers.

Of course, increasing the size of elements also makes them easier to use with a mouse, so whenever possible, we show larger elements on all devices, instead of dynamically adjusting the size.

Accessibility
if you don't see perfectly, it's easy to adjust the text size on a desktop device. It's much harder on a mobile phone. Making things a bit larger by default makes it less likely that people run into accessibility issues.

There's just one thing...
There's just one slight downside with the current Workspace implementation of this feature: it doesn't distinguish between desktop devices, and touchscreen devices. In some ways, this is because it's impossible to do this correctly. For example, a Surface Pro 3 has a touchscreen, but can also be used with a mouse. Should we increase the size of elements on this device, or not?

For the first release of the new Workspace, we could be accused of taking the easy way out. We're currently increasing the size of elements for all screens that are 1024 pixels wide or less. Why 1024 pixels? This is the logical width of the iPad's screen. By setting the threshold at 1024 pixels, we ensure that iPads get the larger sizes.
This has the side-effect of also increasing the size of elements on desktop PCs, if you use Appway inside a small window.

For the future, we intend to be smarter about how we adjust the sizes of these elements.

Workspace Design Notes #12: The Mystery of the Disappearing Chevron

Published October 5, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Screen Design

Screen Layout

It's hard to predict the kinds of things people will notice in a user interface. When working on the new Workspace, I don't think anyone would have predicted one of the most commonly asked questions:

Why does the Phase Chevron scroll away?

When you're in an Appway process, there's a phase chevron at the top of the screen that tells you the title of the current screen, the phases the current process has, and where in the process you are. In the screenshot below, the user is in the second phase of the process, "Use Case".

Once the user scrolls down, the chevron scrolls out of the screen.

This doesn't happen with the normal, main header. It stays put. It's only the chevron that disappears.

Why? For two reasons.

Reason 1: A clear, focused design
Once users start scrolling down, we're assuming that they want to fill in the form. This means that they know where they are, and what their task is. Hence, showing the chevron is no longer necessary; it shows information the user is already aware of. To make sure that the UI is now focused on the user's current task — filling in form fields —extraneous visual clutter is removed, and the chevron scrolls away.

Reason 2: Mobile
On your average desktop PC, the main header and the chevron combined take up, at most, a sixth of the window's height. That's fine; there's still plenty of room for the other UI elements. But on a mobile phone, the situation is rather different. Here, the two headers combined can easily take up a third of the screen. On these devices, allowing the chevron to scroll away provides some much-needed space.

More Complex Behavior
We'd like to support more complex behavior in the future; maybe shrinking the main header when the user starts scrolling. This requires a lot of thought – any feedback on this topic, as on any other of the topics covered in the Workspace Design Notes, is very welcome.

Appway Admin Training: Update your Toolbox

Published September 28, 2015 by n/A

Diagnosis

Deployment

System Architecture

Launching this month, Appway Academy's new two-day Administrator training course provides participants with an in-depth understanding of how to install, configure, deploy and maintain an Appway Platform.

You’ll learn about the core architectural components of Appway and how to configure them for your environment. You'll also discover how to do daily checks, as well as tasks that should be done on a regular basis to ensure a healthy platform. Furthermore, you'll also explore trouble-shooting techniques so that you're prepared should any issues arise.

This course is not just theory, however: We provide several exercises so you also gain hands-on experience of the material covered.

The course is comprised of two modules: Architecture and Configuration, and Operation and Maintenance. The modules can be taken independently, and do not have to be completed sequentially.

The next session takes place in Zurich on 20 – 21 October 2015. To register, visit the Administrator Training page.

Note: Participants are expected to have already successfully completed Appway Fundamental training. An understanding of Java server administration, and basic skills in infrastructure management (application deployment on a WebServer, tool usage monitoring, log management etc) are also required.

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Image courtesy Heath Cajandig / Flickr

Appway Sphere: The Faces Behind Developer

Published September 21, 2015 by Cate

Appway Concepts

Application Design

Screen Design

Appway HQ here in Zürich is buzzing with excitement and anticipation as our conference, Appway Sphere 2015, starts tomorrow! Two days full of knowledge-sharing, insights and interaction await participants. From design to delivery, the great speakers we have lined up are going to provide valuable take-aways and share their experience with attendees.

We're also going to be there — meet the team behind the Developer portal, find out about upcoming initiatives and tell us what you think! How can we better support your success?

Come find out about planned updates, and share your experience with us: Do you have a great idea we should implement on developer.appway.com? Is there something you'd like us to change?

We'll be there throughout the whole conference and look forward to meeting you. We have a stand in the lounge areas, so come see us any time you have a couple of minutes to spare.

See you there!

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.9

Published September 21, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

Rich Screen Controls

Extensions

Integration Link

The product team are happy to announce the release of Appway 6.2.9. This patch contains eight bugfixes, and five new features.

Highlights of this release include:

Process Message Indexing: Improve the performance of the process engine when making heavy usage of process messages.
Dropdown List: Correctly handle the "searchable" property of Dropdown List screen components created with Appway 5.3, 6.0 or 6.1.
Several bugfixes for Integration Links

Information about the Dropdown List
Please note that starting with Appway 6.2, non-searchable Dropdown List components created with Appway 5.3, 6.0 or 6.1 suddenly became searchable. This bug has been fixed in this release, restoring the original behavior: if a Dropdown List was not searchable in Appway 5.3, 6.0 or 6.1, it is now also not searchable in Appway 6.2.9.

Customers relying on the new behavior of Appway 6.2 to 6.2.8 may set the configuration property "nm.dropdown.searchable.default" to "true" to keep the current behavior.

This change has an effect only on non-searchable Dropdown Lists added to screens with Appway 5.3, 6.0 or 6.1. It does not affect searchable Dropdown Lists (created with any version of Appway), or non-searchable Dropdown Lists created with Appway 6.2 or newer.

More information can be found in the Appway 6.2.9 Release Notes (PDF).

Extensions
Furthermore, five extensions have also been updated:

DataStore 3.0.13
Functions 2.7.4
ProcessAuditTrail 2.2.1
WebServices 2.2.14
WorkspaceCollaboration 1.1.2

Workspace Design Notes #11: The "Adding Elements" Trap

Published September 14, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Screen Design

Screen Actions

This post focuses on a very common usability issue: How to design a user interface that allows the user to add a new element to a list in a way that isn't too confusing. But that doesn't sound like it should be difficult, right? And it also seems like something peculiarly specific to be concerned about. Well, it turns out there's more to it than initially meets the eye…

Let's say you're designing a screen that allows the user to add an address to an address list. Your screen might look like this:

Once the user fills in the form and clicks "Add Address", the new address is shown at the top, is editable, and a form to add a second address is shown below it. The screen now looks like this:

All of this seems very logical. Unfortunately, it's not.

Pretend for a second that you're seeing this screen for the first time:

You've just opened it, you're in a hurry, you need to quickly enter a client's address, and your colleagues are already discussing where to go grab lunch.

"Okay, I'm on the Addresses screen. Let's see... here's the form, enter the new address. Do I need to click the Add Address button? No, I only need one address, and I've already entered one. Click 'next', and I'm done. Time for lunch!"

Unfortunately, the user just lost the entered data; since "Add Address" was not clicked, the address was never stored.

Breaking the Pattern
It's very easy to either miss the "Add Address" button, or misunderstand what it does. On most Appway screens, you can just fill in form fields, and click "next". Everything you've entered is automatically stored. But not on this screen.

This issue occurs on all screens that show forms to the user, forms where information is only stored if the user clicks on a button other than "next" or "previous".

In fact, it also occurs outside of the Workspace. Have you ever tried to add an inline style to an Appway Screen component, saved the Screen, tested it, and wondered why your inline style was lost? Well, the Appway Screen editor Style tab behaves the same way as the example above. It's easy to misunderstand what the "Add" button does, or just not notice it at all.

It looks like the selected component has a "MyCSSClass" class — but it does not.

Note: The reason why we decided not to alter this yet is because we plan to replace inline styles with a better system in a future version of Appway.

But let's return to the most important question: How do you fix this problem?

There are two options. You must either force the user to click the button, or make clicking the button unnecessary.

Forcing the user to click the button
In both the examples above, the user doesn't click the button because it's possible to fill in the form without clicking the button. Therefore, the easiest solution is not to show the form until the button has been clicked.

For example, if you want to add an action to a Screen component, Appway will not allow you to edit the action's properties until after you've clicked the "Add" button.

Unlike styles, you've never accidentally lost any actions; it's impossible.

If you apply the same solution to the address example, the user will see this upon first opening the screen:

At this point, the user's only choice is to click "Add Address". It is no longer possible to forget to click the button. Once clicked, the screen now looks like this:

This design makes it impossible for the user to accidentally lose data.

One last detail: After the user has clicked "Add Address" once, the button's label changes to "Add Another Address", thus ensuring that the button's meaning is obvious. Users only have to click it if it they want more addresses to be added, not if they want to store the data they've already entered.

Forcing the user to click the button is one solution to this problem. Another solution is to make clicking the button unnecessary.

Make clicking the button unnecessary

Notice how in the solution above, when users first reach the Addresses screen, they have to click the Add Address button? There's no other choice — unless they don't want to enter any addresses.

If you know that the user has to add at least one item to a list, you can skip that first screen, automatically add an empty element to the list, and immediately jump to this screen:

This way, clicking the Add Address button is no longer necessary; the user can fill in the form, click "next", and the address will be stored properly.

Conclusion
Avoid screens that show forms where data will not be stored when the user clicks "next" (unless they are forms for data that never has to be stored— search fields, for example). Such screens are particularly common when users have to add and remove elements from lists.

For those screens, use one of the two solutions described above, depending on whether or not the user has to add at least one element to the list.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.8

Published September 7, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

We're happy to announce that the latest patch release for Appway 6.2 is now available.

The most notable changes are a performance improvement for bulk delete operations on cluster installations with file system store, and fixes for a NullPointerException error and layout issue in the searchable Dropdown List screen component.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.7 to 6.2.8.

For more detailed information, please see the Appway 6.2.8 Release Notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 5.3.17

Published September 6, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

Appway 5.3.17 is now available for download. A small bugfix release, it includes an upgraded Spring library and an upgrade to Apache Camel 2.8.7. The Camel upgrade resolves thread management issues.

Furthermore, the login page is no longer forced to be loaded in the topmost frame of the window.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 5.3.16 to 5.3.17

For further details, please see the Appway 5.3.17 Release Notes (PDF).

Appway 6.2: Screen Design Expert Training

Published August 31, 2015 by n/A

Screen Structure

Screen Layout

Screen Design

Launching this month, Appway Academy's one-day expert training course provides participants with an in-depth understanding of screen design with Appway 6.2. Discover how easy it is to design and maintain Appway's reusable and modular screens.

You'll learn about screen components and templates as well as design patterns within the context of Appway 6.2. How do form screens differ from list screens? What special screen types are there? Which components should be used in specific situations? Dive into screen design best practice to further enhance your Appway skills.

This training is suitable for those who have previously participated in an Appway Screen Design training and would like to refresh and update their knowledge for Appway 6.2.

The first session takes place in Zurich on Thursday, September 10. To register, visit the Screen Design Training page.

Note: Participants are expected to have already successfully completed Appway Fundamental training.

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Image: Death to Stock Photo

Workspace Design Notes #10: Why Use the Border Layout Manager (Part 2)

Published August 24, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

Screen Design

Screen Layout

Last week's post set the stage and introduced how hierarchies can be mapped across to the various areas of the Border Layout Manager screen component. This week's post discusses visual hierarchies and how they can be displayed in the context of the Border Layout Manager, building on the themes discussed last week. How can you arrange screens using the relationships between items? How do you reflect global and local navigation in your design?

Visual hierarchy
What's a visual hierarchy? The way visual elements are arranged on a screen conveys a hierarchy to the user. The "Western" reading flow (top-down, left-to-right) implies a hierarchy. Things on the left are "above" things on the right. Nesting (outside-inside) also implies a hierarchy. Things outside are "above" things inside. And so on.

This ties in with our goal of guiding users. If people order their reading of a screen in a standard way, we want them to start with information about where they are (the Phase Chevron, for example), followed by the content they're supposed to look at or fill in (a form on a screen, for example), and eventually end up at a button that brings them to the next screen (the "next" button in the Flow Bar, for example).

Now, what kind of visual hierarchy does the Border Layout Manager imply?

The header is clearly at the top of the hierarchy. Since the footer encompasses the full width, I would put it second. It is important to note that this is an instance where users could either read the footer as "below" the content, or the content as "inside" the footer. This changes the perceived hierarchical relationship — but visual elements like shadows can help push users into one or the other direction.

For the two elements in the center, I'd put the left sidebar visually "above" the content area. The right sidebar could be either "above" the content area, or "below" it, depending on context.

As an aside, something else to consider here is that the next and back icons should be aligned with the content area; that way, even though they're hierarchically "above" the content, the alignment conveys the idea that they have an effect on what's visible in the content area.

Now that we have a hierarchy for the categories of things in Appway (see Part 1), and a hierarchy for the areas in the Border Layout manager, it's a simple matter of matching the two. The portal doesn't need the context information and the local navigation, while the process screens don't need the global navigation, so we end up with the following two arrangements:

In addition to marrying our category hierarchy with our Border Layout Manager hierarchy, this arrangement has the added benefit of making process screens visually distinct from non-process screens. In other words, users always know whether or not they're in a guided process.

Finishing Touches
There are a couple of things remaining: What about headers within a process? What about in-screen navigation? The decisions on where to place these items build upon the design outlined above.

When we need a second header inside the process, which tells you which stage of the process you're currently in, where does it go? Well, hierarchically, it's above the content (it tells you information about the content), but not necessarily above the context information (which can be about the process, not just the current screen). That puts it here:

On longer screens, there is sometimes a Table of Contents component that allows users to jump through a screen. Where does that go? Well, hierarchically, it's above the actual content of the screen, because it allows you to navigate through it, but below anything else. This means that it needs to go below the process header.

Conclusion
While explaining the reasoning behind our Workspace Design guidelines is of interest, it's also important that the final design decisions don'tonly come down to logical arguments. Instead, design is about what works.

So the question isn't really "Why did we put context information inside the right sidebar?" Instead, the question is, "Do our users understand how this works?"

Our user testing activities suggest "yes".

Workspace Design Notes #10: Why Use the Border Layout Manager (Part 1)

Published August 17, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

Screen Design

Our Workspace Design documentation contains clear instructions: "To create the basic [screen] layout, use the Border Layout Manager." It tells you to "use the North region of the Border Layout Manager for headers" and "use the South section of the Border Layout Manager for footers."

When needed, we added some additional rules — if you use a Table of Contents component, put it into the left sidebar, but make sure that it appears below the process header, for example.

Saying "what" to do is not the same as explaining the reasoning behind this choice: We've been pretty circumspect about providing detailed explanations about why we think the basic screen layout should be built using the Border Layout Manager. This post remedies that situation by starting with some theoretical explanation; next week's post takes a deeper dive into how visual hierarchies map across to the Border Layout Manager.

There are two different reasons for the recommendations on usage of the Border Layout Manager.

Separation of concerns. Each area of the Border Layout Manager should have a clear, well-defined, consistent reason for existing.
Hierarchy. The Border Layout Manager implies a visual hierarchy; the things we put into the Border Layout Manager need to be consistent with that visual hierarchy.

Separation of Concerns
Any good layout has to be driven by the content. The main goal is to have well-organized content that helps users get their bearings: Where am I? What's on this page? What do I need to do to achieve my goal?

The first step in defining a layout should be to assess what content needs to presented on screen, and then identify a suitable way to structure it.

A typical Appway solution has five different categories of things it shows to the user.

Global functions or "utilities" (logout, show notifications, search, user settings)
Global navigation (home, start account opening process)
Forms or "content" (enter data into a bunch of fields on a screen)
Local navigation (go to the next screen in this process)
Context information (Who are the parties in this account opening? What's their risk rating?)

It's usually best not to mix these categories. You wouldn't want to put the button that starts an entirely new account opening next to the button that moves you ahead a step in the current account opening, for example. It would also not be advisable to put the logout link next to the field where you enter a party's name.

What's more, you want people to clearly and easily understand what something is. Is this a button that moves me ahead in the current process, or is this a button that takes me out of this process and back to my portal? You can greatly improve clarity by giving each category of thing its own location; that way, people can easily understand what each thing is, based on where it is.

Coincidentally, the five categories of things a typical Appway solution shows mostly map to the five areas of the Border Layout Manager. In order to help people understand Appway solutions more easily, we can therefore just map each category to one of the Border Layout Manager's areas. The mapping is intuitively obvious for most of these areas. You probably need to put global functions into the header, and forms into the content area, right?

Hierarchy
The second reason for the recommended usage of the Border Layout Manager — and the missing clue that fully explains where everything needs to go — is the hierarchy of the screen.

The five different categories of things in Appway are hierarchically related to each other. Global functions and global navigation are at the top of this hierarchy: They're always applicable, and are independent of other content.

The content area itself is therefore below the two global elements: What's visible in the content area depends on the global action or global navigation that the user triggers.

Context information could be yet another level below — or on the same level as the content — depending on what it is about. If it's just context information about the current content, it would be below it; if it's context information about a process (of which the content area shows one step), it would be on the same level as the content area.

As for local navigation, it probably makes sense to think of it as residing somewhere between global navigation and content. Local navigation influences what's visible in the content area, but only to a limited degree; it can't entirely change what the user is doing, just move the user through the running process.

If you think about the relationship between these things in this way, you'll end up with a hierarchy that looks something like this:

Stated very briefly: "Things above influence things below".

Two different elements reside at the top of this hierarchy; we should be able to distinguish between them, too. Global Actions need to always be visible. You always want to see your notifications, and you always need to be able to log out. Global Navigation, on the other hand, does not need to be visible when you're inside a process. You probably don't want to start another account opening from inside a running account opening, so it's therefore okay to only show Global Navigation outside of running processes.

(The only exception to this is the Home link, which needs to be available at all times. This is why we've taken "Home" out of the Global Navigation section, and put it into Global Actions.)

Based on this reasoning, Global Actions are above Global Navigation in the hierarchy.

So now we've organized our five categories into a hierarchy. What exactly did that buy us? Well, the Border Layout Manager also implies a hierarchy. If we think that Global Actions should be above Global Navigation, for example, then they should be visually organized that way in the Border Layout Manager as well.
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Come back next week for Part 2, taking a look at how visual hierarchies map across to the Border Layout Manager.

Workspace Design Notes #9: Hierarchies, Boxes and Nesting

Published August 10, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Screen Design

The previous post in this series on Workspace Design discussed icons, and how their use has been reduced and simplified within the context of the default Workspace. This post moves onto another area where the visual design has been rethought: nesting.

Appway solutions deal with hierarchical, structured, highly complex data. For example, accounts have roles, which are lists of clients, which have lists of addresses, and so on. This data often has to be shown to the user in a way that makes sense, and can be understood easily and quickly.

The most obvious way of visually representing this kind of hierarchical data is to use boxes, and nest them inside each other. But if you do that, you tend to end up with screens that look like this:

This screen is already difficult to read – and the problem only gets worse once you start to scroll down.

At this point, you no longer really see what the boxes are for.

All you have is a bunch of vertical lines that tell you that "something" is inside "something" that's inside "something else" that's inside "something else" — but no indication of what any of this actually means.

The basic problem here is that there's already a lot of things on these screens. Adding more stuff to organize the stuff that's already there works up to a point, but eventually starts to become highly counterproductive: All of the additional things just add more clutter, making the screen even harder to understand.

I wrote a recipe explaining how to avoid this situation as we discovered this design set-up in more than one Appway solution; it's an easy trap to fall into.

Simplifying structure
Avoiding excessive nesting was one of our goals while developing the new Workspace design. By default, we wanted to achieve a modern, flat look; a look that did not fill the screen with "boxes inside boxes inside boxes".

As a result of this decision, Adaptive Flow Layout Groups no longer draw boxes or indents, for example. Instead, they just add titles. What's more, there are only two visual levels of nesting to avoid deep, difficult to understand hierarchies of elements.

In the following screenshot, each Adaptive Flow Layout Group is inside its parent group. As you can see, the second-level nesting is no longer visually distinct from the first-level nesting.

With this approach, the screens in our Client Onboarding solution all look clean and flat, despite sometimes containing relatively complex data.

Of course, we realize that while a completely flat design would be preferable, it is not always possible to avoid visual nesting in real-world solutions. But by avoiding it in the default Workspace design, we're giving you a little bit of room — when absolutely, unavoidably, unrelentingly necessary! — to add a small amount of nesting to your screens, without immediately causing your screens to turn into the digital equivalent of a Matryoshka doll.

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Matryoshka image on blog overview page courtesy Bradley Davis/Flickr
Matryoshka image at end of blog post courtesy Dennis Jarvis/Flickr

Workspace Design Notes #8: Icons

Published August 3, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Screen Design

Workspace

Recent Appway versions ship with a very sophisticated, very powerful icon framework that allows you to use icons in many different contexts, and globally switch between PNG and SVG icons. But icons need to be handled with care: they are often not as memorable as you would wish, and can have dangerous side-effects.

This post, the eighth in our series on Workspace Design concepts, discusses the impact icons can have — and how best to work with them.

What's the problem?
Icons are hard to memorize, and people usually don't recognize them. There are no standards for icons (particularly in domain-specific applications), so people simply do not understand what many of the icons mean. There's a lot of research on the topic, and it usually doesn't go well for icons.

Apart from a small set of commonly-used icons, most people have no clue what a majority of icons actually mean.

Why are they dangerous?
Icons look good at first, but once you start adding a few, you'll start to find more and more places where they seem to make sense. So you add icons for different account types. Then you add icons for different parties. Then it seems that you really should add icons depicting the relationships between parties and accounts — surely an Account Holder and a Beneficial Owner could have different icons…

Soon your solution will be swimming in icons – and your users drowning in confusion, unable to understand what each and every icon means, or what they are supposed to do with them.

Because icons are mostly useless and often dangerous, our own Client Onboarding solution uses them very sparingly. We opt for alternatives whenever possible.

Where Icons Can Help
Icons aren't universally bad. There are some specific situations where they can add value.

Icons work well when they're commonly recognized: A lot of people recognize a delete icon, and file icons like the PDF icon, for example.

Icons can also help give a screen some structure. Taking a look at the list of uploaded documents below, the sidebar would look strange without the file icons. Furthermore, the delete icons are clear and understandable due to the context in which they appear.

Verbs vs Nouns vs Adjectives
Icons can be used to indicate verbs, to indicate adjectives (i.e. a state), or to indicate nouns. In the new Appway Workspace, we use them for all three.

For things like the next and back buttons, and for delete buttons, icons are used as verbs. Clicking on them triggers an action.
For things like the list of uploaded documents (see previous image), they're used as nouns. Clicking on them gets you to something, e.g. to an uploaded PDF.
For things like a to-do list, icons are used as adjectives. They show the state of a task in a to-do list; the checkmark means "done", for example. You can't click on these icons.

In general, verb and adjective icons tend to be more abstract than noun icons, because they represent concepts, rather than actual things. Concepts like "log out" or "unfinished" are harder to represent in an icon than "user". Since these icons are harder to design, it's often best to just go with a text label instead of an icon. Text is much less ambiguous than an icon.

If you use icons for nouns, think about whether it's possible to show the actual "thing" they represent, instead of an icon. For uploaded documents, maybe it would be better to show a thumbnail of the actual document, for example.

If You Use Icons
Three rules of thumb when using icons:

Use icons when there are no good alternative solutions, or when the solution with the icon is clearly and vastly better than the alternative solution without the icon.
Use icons when there is no danger of confusion, as the icon used is unambiguous and commonly known.
Do not use icons without labels. Apart from a small set of commonly known icons, people will not know what the icon means if it's not accompanied by a label.

Here are some of the things you might want to think about when deciding to use icons.

Alternatives to Icons
Often, icons can be replaced with a different design element that offers the same functionality, but is easier to understand. Instead of having different icons for account holders, beneficial owners, and so on, you could use typographical elements to achieve the same effect.

Unique and Consistent
Once you decide to use an icon in your solution, use it consistently, whenever the concept the icon represents occurs. Otherwise, people will have a hard time learning what the icon represents.

Make sure that the icon is distinctive, and that the same icon is not used for anything else (e.g. don't use the same icon for "close" and "delete").

Recommendation
As a general rule, do not use icons. If you do decide to break this rule:

Use icons sparingly
Use icons thoughtfully
Use icons consistently

Academy Days: Special Training Sessions at Appway Sphere

Published July 27, 2015 by n/A

Make the most of your trip to Zurich after the conference and join us at Academy Days! From September 23 to October 2, Appway Academy will offer a variety of special training sessions for Appway Developers.

Special Fundamental Training, September 23-24
Get a rock-solid understanding of the Appway basics: Learn to build business processes from scratch! You’ll need a basic understanding of business processes and some experience using web applications. Software development knowledge is recommended, but not required.

Business Analyst Training, September 25
Business analysts who’ve already completed Appway Fundamental Training can specialize and dive a bit deeper in this session: Create mockups with Appway to validate requirements with business stakeholders, and take advantage of Appway's collaboration features to coordinate the development team and control the quality of delivery.

Developer Training, September 28 - October 2
Already completed Appway Fundamental training and want to enhance your development skills further? Gain an in-depth command of Appway business objects, including advanced functionalities, at this Developer Training. You’ll also get advice on best practices when developing applications with Appway.

For more information about prerequisites and course content, visit www.appway.com/sphere2015 and register today!

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.7

Published July 27, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

Business Objects

A new version of Appway 6.2 is available: 6.2.7

It is a tiny bugfix release. It fixes an issue with the login page if Appway is embedded in an iframe, and it includes some previously missing null pointer checks in the Data Table screen component. Finally, users are no longer allowed to create business objects with IDs starting with a hyphen.

For more details, please see the Release Notes (PDF).

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.6 to 6.2.7.

Workspace Design Notes #7: Buttons

Published July 20, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

Screen Design

Process Activities

The tactile, physical nature of our world usually tells us what to expect from our actions. Understanding the difference between a toffee hammer and a sledgehammer is reasonably easy, and it’s also pretty clear what happens when using either hammer.

One of these hammers is small and tiny, and is used to create a small and tiny impact. The other is large and heavy, and is used to create a large, severe impact. The physical size and the visual style of the device tells you what it should be used for, and what kind of impact you can expect from using it.

These rules all go out of the window once we enter the realm of computers. On a computer screen, a small "hammer" can have a large impact, and a large "hammer" can have a small impact. There are no laws of physics governing the relationship between how things on your screen look, and what they do: Two buttons that look exactly the same could trigger vastly different actions.

When we started designing the buttons for the new Workspace, we wanted to make sure that buttons provide a basic indication of their power. Can I click this button without giving it much thought, because it's more of a toffee hammer, or should I really think before clicking this button, because it's more of a sledgehammer?

The button's look should communicate this information to you.

However, having different button types that are then used incorrectly only makes the problem worse. The last thing you want is a toffee hammer that punches a sledgehammer-sized hole into your table when you just want to break some candy.

Button Types and Getting it Right

When we thought about these two goals — different button types that communicate the severity of pressing that button; clear guidance on when to use which button type — we came up with the following idea. What if we divided buttons into two basic groups based on their "reach" or "power"?

Screen Action buttons: Buttons that only have a local effect on the current screen
Flow Action buttons: Buttons that have a larger effect on the current Process

The visual style of a button indicates the button's "power". The button that's only outlined has a smaller effect than the button that's filled in.

We felt that this alone didn't go quite far enough. After all, there are some actions that have particularly destructive power, and should get their own visual style: Deleting a Process, removing a party from an account, and other irreversible, disruptive, or dangerous actions should be highlighted - and visually set apart from other buttons. For these buttons, we added the "Destructive Action" type.

This leaves us with the following rules:

If a button's action only affects the local screen, use the Screen Action type
If the button's action affects the Process, use the Flow Action type
Overriding the first two rules, if the button's action is dangerous or destructive, use the Destructive Action type

Following these rules allows the user to make an educated guess about the impact a button has.

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Toffee hammer image courtesy H is for Home/Flickr; Sledgehammer image courtesy UK Ministry of Defence/Flickr (Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0)

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.6

Published July 17, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

The latest release for Appway 6.2 is now available.

Appway 6.2.6 contains bugfixes for the Dropdown List and Data Table screen components, a network performance improvement for the cluster (workaround for a Hazelcast bug), and some other items.

For more detailed information, please see the Release Notes (PDF).

Changes introduced to Appway between 6.2.3 and 6.2.6 include performance improvements for searchable Dropdown Lists, which, as the image below shows, reach up to 229% for IE 8.

Furthermore, a bugfix for a potential memory leak in multi-node installations when using the Data Table component in the workspace has also been added, along with a new version of the ComponentExtension (v6.2.8).

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.x to 6.2.6.

Further information may be found in the Appway 6.2.4 Release Notes (PDF) and the Appway 6.2.5 Release Notes (PDF).

Workspace Design Notes #6: Why There is (Almost) No Drag and Drop

Published July 13, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

Screen Design

"We'd like to show our manager something really cool. How about adding some drag and drop to a few of the screens?"

I've heard this a few times now, and I thought it might be a good idea to outline why the Workspace has (almost) no drag and drop functionality.

There are three main reasons why we've made the decision to avoid drag and drop interactions whenever possible:

Drag and drop doesn't work well on small screens
Drag and drop causes gesture overloading on touch screens
Drag and drop is not accessible

Let's look at these in turn.

Problem 1: Drag and drop doesn't work well on small screens
In order for drag and drop to work properly, you typically need to have two different areas visible on your screen. Each area contains draggable items; you interact with this user interface by dragging things from one area to the other.

It is immediately obvious that this requires a lot of space. In an optimal situation you would want to show the two areas next to each other, so that the user can drag things from left to right, or from right to left. This arrangement is not, however, possible on a narrow phone screen. As the image below shows, there's just not enough space to show draggable elements with meaningful content side-by-side on a mobile phone.

An alternative solution is to put items below each other.

But even so, the user interface is very cramped - and now you're running into problems with vertical space. The wireframe above doesn't show the solution's headers or footers, yet still manages to show barely any draggable elements.

If at this point it's still required that drag and drop be a part of your interface, you could use a UI element that hides part of the screen, like tabs or accordions.

Having used an accordion, you now can't see both areas at the same time; you have to teach users that they can drag elements and then drop them on top of accordion headers.

The space problem on mobile devices is compounded by the fact that smartphones have touch screens, so interactive elements need to be larger than on a desktop system. Fingers are less precise pointing devices than computer mice, after all.

But that's not the only issue touch screens cause.

Problem 2: Drag and drop causes gesture overloading on touch screens
On a desktop PC, scrolling and dragging are two completely different, discrete actions. You scroll using the scrollbar, or the scroll wheel, or some other separate interface; you drag by clicking on an element, and moving it around.

On a touch screen, scrolling and dragging are the same action. For both, you touch the screen with your finger, and then move the finger.

Is the user trying to scroll, or trying to drag?

These questions mean that the user interface has to twist itself in knots to figure out what the user is attempting to do.

The simplest thing the UI has to pay attention to is what the user actually touches. A draggable element? Perhaps the user wants to drag. Something that can't be dragged? Perhaps the user wants to scroll.

This set of decisions is already error-prone, since users don't always pay close attention to what they're doing. Particularly when they are trying to scroll, users might not notice that they can't just touch the screen wherever they want. This inattention can lead to erroneous user input, where users end up moving elements around when they simply wanted to scroll.

It then gets even trickier, as differentiating between scrolling and dragging based on the touched element alone does not work. Consider this user interface:

Here, the user drags elements out of a scrollable pane. It's not possible to touch the scrollable pane anywhere outside of a draggable element. In other words, the UI has to differentiate between scrolling and dragging based on the direction of the user's finger movement. Moving the finger up or down? Probably scrolling. Moving the finger sideways? Probably dragging.

But, again, you run into difficulties. What if the user wants to drag an element from the top of the right pane to the bottom of the left pane? Now the finger is moving down, but the user is trying to drag.

Simply put, the user interface can't reliably figure out what the user is trying to do.

You could try to solve this in different ways:

"I'll only make things draggable if users long-tap on them". While it may sound intuitive, you're now hiding important interactions from the user; people might never figure out that they can drag things around.
"I'll only make part of my draggable element actually draggable". This partly works, but now you're making drag and drop even harder to use than it was before: Remember that touch screens require large touch targets, because fingers are not precise input devices, and you're now adding visual clutter (that indicates where to drag) to the user interface.
"I'll just avoid scrolling". This works sometimes. If you’re designing an app with static, never-changing screens, for a specific device, it works. In other words, if you’re showing drag and drop in a presentation, and you know ahead of time exactly what you’re going to show, and what device you’re going to use, you’re fine. But in the real world, where the list of draggable elements can grow, other features could be added to the screen, and where you have to target multiple devices with potentially smaller screens, you can’t avoid scrolling.
"I don't have two areas - I just want people to order things by dragging them up or down". Again, this sounds reasonable - but this only makes the problem worse, because we can now no longer attempt to figure out the user's intentions based on the drag direction of the user's finger. Both scrolling and dragging are now up/down gestures.

If you target one specific device with a predefined screen size, only have a limited set of draggable elements, and the screen itself contains few elements (so it doesn't scroll), then yes: You can implement drag and drop. That's why drag and drop works well in demos: Demos are a completely controlled environment where you know exactly what device you're going to use, and what the screen is going to contain.

As soon as these assumptions do not hold (through people using different devices, the number of draggable items changing, the number of other elements on the screen changing and so on), it all starts falling apart.

Problem 3: Drag and drop is not accessible to people with certain disabilities or illnesses
Moving your mouse on top of a button and clicking the mouse is relatively easy. The whole action is divided up into two discrete, simple tasks, and users can take their time to get each task right. Move the mouse, correct for mistakes. Is the cursor on top of the button? Okay, now click.

This works almost equally well whether the user is using an actual mouse, a trackpad, a trackball, a graphics tablet, or perhaps even something like a head-operated input device.

It also works for partially sighted people, because you can zoom in on the button. Similarly, a screen reader used by blind people is able to identify the button, and allow people to trigger it.

Drag and drop is a completely different story.

First of all, it's a much more complex interaction. You have to aim and click the mouse, then hold the mouse button down, aim again while holding the mouse button down, and release the mouse button once the second aiming action has been completed.

Drag and drop can be even harder to execute on a touchscreen device, since you're now covering part of the screen with your hand, but you can't remove your hand and see what's beneath, because that ends the drag action, and drops the element somewhere you probably did not intend.

If you're an able-bodied person with reasonably good eyesight, you may never have thought about this, but drag and drop requires quite a bit of dexterity and precision from users.

This can be a problem if you're suffering from illnesses like RSI or arthritis; if you have physical impairments that make it difficult to move a mouse cursor with precision; or if you simply don't see well. You might also be using a special input device that makes drag and drop harder to execute than with a mouse. And for some situations – e.g. a blind person using a screen reader – normal buttons work just fine, but drag and drop may be entirely unavailable.

If the alternative to drag and drop is to simply offer a button that users can click, choose to use the button: A button is always faster, easier to understand, simpler to use, and more accessible.

Small Details, Large Impact
There are other minor problems with choosing drag and drop: It's a complex interaction that requires getting a lot of details right. Most web apps don't get these details right, which can be frustrating.

For example, you need to take another aspect of scrolling into account. Often, people want to drag an element to a place that's outside of the visible area of the current screen; if they drag the element to the screen edge, it needs to start scrolling — and web apps don't do this automatically.

"Edge dragging" causes additional issues on touchscreen devices: You've selected an item but are now covering the screen with your hand, and can't see how far the screen has scrolled. Worse, since your finger is near the edge of the screen, it's possible that the device loses track of your finger, and drops the dragged element prematurely, thus triggering an erroneous action.

Gestures and Operating Systems
Mobile browsers use gestures for built-in features (like going back to the previous page) that are also used by drag and drop. Overriding these built-in gestures in order to make your drag and drop functionality respond correctly can be confusing to users, and can cause technical problems if done poorly.

I quickly want to mention a final concern: People sometimes think that it would be nifty to hide functionality in sidebars that are shown when the user swipes in from the edges of the screen. Unfortunately, operating systems manufacturers also agree that it is nifty behavior, so more and more manufacturers are now using edge swipe gestures for built-in, OS-level features, like Slide Over in iOS 9. This means that these gestures should not be used by apps or websites anymore: operating systems already use them.

Possible Solutions
All of this does not mean that you have to absolutely avoid drag and drop in all situations. For example, Appway's slider component supports drag and drop. However, it also supports simple clicking. If you can't drag, you can simply click on the slider bar, and the knob jumps to the location you've clicked. Or you can put the focus on the knob itself (e.g. by clicking it, or tabbing to it), and use the keyboard’s arrow buttons to move it. Even though the slider supports drag and drop, it is completely accessible from the keyboard.

Similarly, one spec of a drag and drop based component we're working on switches to a click-based user interface on smaller screens. Unfortunately, this doesn't solve all of the problems (it doesn't solve gesture overloading or accessibility) — which is why it's still a spec, and not yet a finished component.

If you do want to provide drag and drop
If you do want to provide drag and drop features, make sure you really understand the possible repercussions: Once you deploy your app to thousands of people using thousands of different devices, you're going to run into all kinds of issues. Showing drag and drop in a presentation can be a short-term win, but supporting drag and drop always ends up being a long-term headache. Once deployed, it's going to generate huge amounts of cost in maintenance, user support, and lost time due to user problems.

If there is no way round not implementing drag and drop functionality, it's best to think of it as a secondary interaction pattern, similar to a keyboard shortcut:

Design your user interface such that it can primarily be used without drag and drop.
Add drag and drop support only when the UI already works well without drag and drop, as a bonus for people who prefer to use drag and drop.
Add it only on devices where adding drag and drop does not cause problems.
Finally, sweat the small stuff: What happens if there's more items on the screen, activating scrolling? What happens if the user drags something to the screen's edge?

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Photos courtesy renatomitra/flickr and lisbokt/flickr

Developer Day at Appway Sphere 2015

Published July 6, 2015 by Madeline McSherry

Appway Concepts

Workspace

System Architecture

Appway’s second conference – Appway Sphere 2015 – touches down in Zurich this September. Designed for the global Appway community, the conference features a full day of presentations, conversations and hands-on workshops designed exclusively for Appway developers.

On Developer Day on September 23, you’ll meet the creators and innovators developing Appway’s core technology and hear from them first-hand about a variety of topics.

Discover the latest trends in UX design and learn about how Appway is pioneering industry best practice in design approaches.
Explore the Appway Workspace with in-depth discussions on how to monitor performance, leverage insights, and collaborate across industries and time zones, all in one place.
Inspect the ins and outs of agile testing, take a closer look at the Appway Cluster, and discuss how to champion DevOps in your day-to-day.
Dive into big data with a presentation on data handling for the next generation of business applications, and exchange best practices for running Appway in the Cloud.

Register today using the promo code EARLYBIRD2015 to take advantage of our early bird prices. If you are a customer, please reach out to your account manager for special offers.

To learn more about what you can expect at Appway Sphere 2015, visit our website: appway.com/sphere2015

Workspace Design Notes #5: Am I in a Process?

Published June 29, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

Screen Design

When it comes to screens and user interaction, there's a huge difference between a screen that's part of a process, and one that is not. Inside a process, user decisions should be minimized: the process should guide the user. Outside of the process, the user is in the driver's seat, and should decide what to do.

Users should therefore know when they're in a process, and when they're not. They should know whether they are expected to let themselves be guided by a process, or whether they are expected to make decisions themselves.

Keeping users on track

In earlier releases of Appway, the difference between a screen inside a process, and a screen outside a process, was not always immediately obvious. Depending on the design, these two different screen types could look almost identical. This is something we wanted to change with the new Workspace design.

An early idea we had was to think of processes as "on rails" (i.e. you're guided along a track like a train, not allowed to roam freely like a car). This visual metaphor lead to the idea of having "rails" on the left and right-hand side of the screen when the user is in a process.

In the wireframes below, we used blue lines along the left and right edge of the content area to create the "rails".

In this design, the back and next buttons would be at the top of the screen, but would be replicated at the bottom once the user scrolls down.

We eventually abandoned this idea. Instead, we introduced the idea of the Flow Bar, a static bar at the bottom of the screen that contains the back and next buttons. We believe that this, together with the chevron at the top of the screen, is enough to visually distinguish process screens from non-process screens.

This is where we stand today, but it is not the end of the road: Distinguishing between process and non-process screens is not sufficient.

It’s easy to think of Appway solutions as being one of two different types: either process-driven, or data-driven. Similarly, screens are often thought of as being "part of a process", or "not part of a process".

In reality it's usually not quite so simple or clear-cut. Even a solution that seems — on the surface — to be entirely process-driven has sections inside its processes that are data-driven.

For example, once you reach the "Profile Parties" screen in our Client Onboarding account opening process, you've reached a small island inside the process — a tiny embedded data-driven section. The process no longer tells you what to do: You can fill in any of the available screens in any order (or even partially fill some sections, and then move to other sections).

The current design creates a visual distinction between process screens, and non-process screens, but doesn’t yet clearly distinguish "data-driven islands" inside processes. That’s something we’re working on for a future version of Appway.

Workspace Design Notes #4: Different Types of Screen

Published June 22, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

One aim of the new Workspace Design was to simplify the task of designing Screens. Appway developers often spend most of their time in the Screen designer, so that's where we can have the biggest impact on productivity.

Here I'd just like to add a quick note about "Screens". The term "screen" can be a potential source of confusion, because we use it in two different ways. A "Screen" (upper-case) is a specific kind of Business Object in Appway that is used to design screens (lower-case). A screen (lower-case) is a rendered page as it appears in the web browser.

One of the ways we've tried to simplify Screen design is by finding generic screen types that are used again and again in applications, and then design components that implement these specific screen types in a well-defined, high-level way.

Using a typical client account opening process as our testing ground, we found that there are two main types of screens in that process:

1. Form screens, where the user fills in different controls
2. List screens, where the user either picks a task from a list, or edits a list

Of course there will always be screens that fit into neither of these two types — and there are going to be screens that have aspects of both. However, in general, thinking of screens in terms of these two archetypes will help you figure out how to build many of the screens required for your application.

Form Screens
Form screens are the kinds of screens you typically associate with a process. They mainly contain components like text fields and dropdowns, and screen content is validated when you jump to the next screen. Here are some examples from Appway Client Onboarding.

All these screens are built using Adaptive Flow Layout components.

List Screens
List screens contain lists. There are two different kinds of list screens:

1. Screens where the user edits the screen content by adding or removing elements from a list
2. Screens where the user picks a task from a list

As mentioned earlier, some list screens could end up combining both of the above types - but we've found that most list screens usually conform to just one of these types.

Here are some examples of editable list screens.

These screens are built using Adaptive Lists, and List Buttons. Each Adaptive List item has a "remove" button (and possibly other UI elements). Below the list, there's an "Add [Element]" button.

Here are some examples of task screens.

Again, the lists are built using Adaptive Lists and List Buttons. This time, though, they have an icon and text on the right-hand side that indicates the item's status; similarly, the List Button's color is used to indicate if the task is done, available, or not yet available. Additionally, the example screen on the left shows explanatory text below the button, outlining what the task is about.

We're currently evaluating whether it makes sense to have two different components with distinctive visual styles for task lists and editable lists. The Workspace design is an ongoing process, and we welcome feedback, positive and negative.

Special Cases
Of course, we know that not all screens fit into these basic types. For example, the Client Onboarding solution contains exceptions to the types such as the "document preview" screen, and the "review changes" screen.

There are two possible approaches when it comes to "exceptional" screens. Either a component for this particular use case already exists, or one will be implement by R&D.

If neither of these apply, a custom component may be required inside the solution (i.e. a Screen include that has its own CSS and, if required, JS Resource, and that can easily be replaced with a built-in component in the future, as Appway’s library of built-in Screen components continues to grow).

In future, we aim to have more specific components for the different list types, and to provide more "special case" components.

Workspace Design Notes #3: The Mobile Experience

Published June 15, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

Screen Design

When coming up with the new Workspace design, one important goal was that it be fully compatible with mobile devices. But rather than just adhering to a general idea, we decided to follow a few specific principles:

Mobile devices are not "second-class citizens"
Neither are desktop devices
We design for use cases, not for devices
Switching devices should be seamless, and running processes should be accessible everywhere (cross-channel processes)
No additional work should be required to make solutions mobile-compatible

Let's start with the last point: In an ideal world, there should be no "optimize for mobile devices" step in any project. For us, this means that Appway's built-in components, and their default visual and interaction designs, should work on all devices without further adaptation.

With Appway 6.2, we have made a huge step towards this goal. If you follow our guidelines when building Appway solutions, you're 99% of the way to a fully working, responsive solution; a bit of testing on different devices will help you to work out the remaining kinks.

Cross-Channel Processes

When thinking about mobile design, people often come up with one of the following two approaches:
1. They provide a watered-down version of whatever is available on the desktop.
2. They provide a mobile version that provides specific functionality that tends to be associated with mobile use.

Both of these approaches are problematic: They confuse devices with use cases. People don't work like that; they don't use specific devices only for specific tasks. Instead, people increasingly use all kinds of different devices in all kinds of situations.

A 2013 study by Forrester Research came to the conclusion that people aren’t picky when it comes to device usage. The typical split you’d expect — desktop PC at their desk, phones while commuting, tablets at client facilities and at home — is only barely reflected in actual device usage numbers. In reality, people use all types of devices in all situations: using tablets at their desk, computers at client facilities and while travelling, and phones for work when at work, even when they’re sitting at their own desk in front of a PC.

Importantly, Forrester also notes that most companies don't support this kind of multi-channel work style; when helping clients implement their Appway solution, we've also discovered that some firms have not yet completely adjusted to the device flexibility of their employees.

No "Mobile Version"

One of the implications of this is that a watered-down version of a solution developed specifically for mobile use is not going to cut it. These feature-deprived mobile versions are preventing users from doing the things they need to do, on the device they want to use.

For example, one might assume that people are not going to do an account opening on a phone. When designing a "mobile version" of a solution, one might thus conclude that the full account opening process does not need to be available. Maybe all that's needed is a simple approval process; that's a small task that works well on a small device.

However, what if users start an account opening on a desktop PC, and have to pause it because they're missing some important piece of information? Later, they might acquire that information while they're talking to the client, but might not have access to a PC right away. If the account opening process is available on the phone, they can simply use their mobile phone, open the active account opening process, and enter the missing piece of information.

In other words, even though it's true that most people might not want to go through a full account opening process on a phone, there are situations where people do have to access an existing account opening process from a mobile phone. That doesn't work if the mobile version is watered down, and only supports part of what the desktop version offers. Instead, the same processes should run consistently on all devices, and people should be able to move seamlessly from device to device.

As usability expert Jakob Nielsen notes:

"Most sites do understand that mobile content cannot be arbitrarily limited. The answer to a question should be the same regardless of where the question is asked: mobile, desktop, tablet."

Design for Use Cases, not Devices

Conversely, people might think about use cases that seem to be specific to mobile devices, and implement mobile versions of those. One such use case is a meeting notes application, where bank employees jot down points discussed during meetings with clients. Typically, these meetings happen at the client's residence or place of work, so bank employees usually want to use their phone or iPad to take notes.

But what if the employee takes their notebook? Or what if the meeting is held via phone, and the employee is sitting at their office desk, in front of their PC? In those situations, they want to use their laptop or PC to enter meeting notes — not their phones.

The important point here is that we should design solutions for use cases — "I want to take notes during a meeting with a client" — and not for specific devices. Instead, make sure that all use cases are accessible on all devices: You can't predict what devices your users are going to use for each use case.

To learn more about this design process, read our "Business Logic First" white paper.

What Appway Offers

When coming up with the new Workspace design, we knew that we did not want the mobile experience to be watered down. Similarly, we knew that we did not want to have mobile-specific processes. Instead, we wanted all processes to be fully functional and fully accessible on all devices. We wanted cross-channel processes.

That's why Appway's new Workspace design uses a single, consistent visual design across devices. It's why all new components are fully responsive. The Data Table, for example, uses the full width of a large desktop screen, but collapses down into a narrow view on smaller devices. There's no need to design two different screens, one for desktop and one for mobile; with components like the new Data Table, the same Screen works across multiple devices.

This doesn't just apply to one individual component. Our components work together, and if used correctly, make the whole solution responsive. As an example, here are two screenshots showing the COB solution as it appears on a desktop PC, and on a mobile phone.

Cross-device processes, designing for use cases instead of devices, no simplified mobile versions: these are what Appway intends to achieve with the new Workspace design.

We want to remove the barriers between mobile and desktop, and ensure that everything works everywhere by default.

Patch Release: Appway 5.3.16

Published June 15, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

The latest patch release for Appway 5.3 is now available. A very small patch, it contains 2 bugfixes and 1 new feature.

Appway 5.3.16 contains a security mechanism to protect against "clickjacking" attacks. Appway no longer allows other web applications (e.g. SharePoint) to embed Appway pages in an iframe.

Appway solutions relying on an iframe to embed one of its own pages, or pages of third-party web applications, are not affected by this change.

Futhermore, version 2.0.94 of the ComponentExtension is also now available.

For more information, please see the Appway 5.3.16 Release Notes (PDF).

Workspace Design Notes #2: Minimizing User Decisions

Published June 8, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Application Design

Workspace

Business applications have a bad reputation: "They're complicated and require a lot of training" or "they can only be used correctly by domain experts."

How come? Business applications are often designed without much thought about user experience. They're designed by business experts who don't mind user interfaces that provide no guidance.

As a result, they can end up looking like this:

The interfaces above are crowded and complex. Each screen contains a lot of information, and many different possible actions you could choose. To be able to use the application successfully, you have to know exactly what you're doing.

Unfortunately, however, people often don't know exactly what they're doing. This causes problems. Our Client Onboarding Study, produced in cooperation with WealthBriefing, came to the conclusion that client onboarding typically takes way too long, is difficult, and is fraught with errors and mistakes.

This is where Appway comes in. Our promise to our clients is that we can decrease the time it takes to do an onboarding, lessen the burden on the person doing the onboarding, and minimize errors and mistakes.

We do this by moving expertise away from the person doing the onboarding, and into the Appway solution.

The goal is to minimize the decisions users have to make, and to replace these user decisions with processes and rules that are executed correctly by default.

Guiding the user
One practical example of this is how we want to direct user attention using the new Workspace design.

In a traditional business application, the user needs to know what to pay attention to. For example, in an account opening, the user needs to know that the first step is to jump to the "Parties" section, and add the parties to the account; that the second step is to make sure that all parties have the appropriate roles, and so on. The user's path through the application is guided by the user themself, and does not follow a straight line.

The user needs to know which sections of the application to visit, and in which order to visit them.

Appway's approach is different. The process makes these decisions for the user, and presents the appropriate sections at the appropriate moment. The user can simply follow the process: Appway makes sure that the user sees all of the relevant information, and fills in all of the relevant fields.

Users move through each screen from top to bottom. At the end of each screen, they click "next", and do the same thing on the next screen. As they scroll through each screen, all relevant information — and all relevant fields — are shown to them. The user never has to backtrack, switch between tabs, scroll back, jump between different pages, or manually decide what the next actions are.

Appway makes the decisions; users follow the process.

Best Practices
While working on the new Workspace design, we tried to keep the following goals in mind.

Make sure that your users see all relevant information, and all relevant fields, when they scroll through a screen from top to bottom
It's better to have long screens, and just allow users to scroll through them, than to add UI elements that hide content (tabs, collapsible sections). These elements can cause users to miss relevant information while requiring them to learn more complex interaction patterns
Each screen should have one single, obvious purpose
Users should only have to make decisions that can't be made automatically by Appway

These rules lessen the user's burden, minimize the potential for errors, and decrease the time it takes for the user to finish a task.

Business applications designed by business experts can provide a good user experience!

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.3

Published June 1, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

This week sees us taking a break from our series on Workspace Design to announce that the latest patch release, Appway 6.2.3, is now available.

This patch release contains 11 bugfixes, 3 changes and 1 new feature.

Here's a short summary of the main items included:

A bugfix for asynchronous invocation of Integration Links in newly-started process instances
A configuration property to enable eviction for cluster files (save memory)
A security mechanism to protect against "clickjacking" attacks (see release notes for upgrade considerations)
Version 6.2.7 of the ComponentExtension

More detailed information can be found in the Appway 6.2.3 Release notes (PDF)

Workspace Design Notes #1: Back to the Future

Published May 25, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

Business Objects

Appway Concepts

Let's take a trip through time, to the beginning of history. The beginning of Appway history, that is.

Close your eyes and imagine that, in the beginning, there was no Appway. A decade ago, there was only Nm'4, the precursor product to Appway.

Nm'4 didn't have what we now think of as Business Objects. It had something similar, though. The "things" in Nm'4 were much less generic than the ones in Appway, and much more geared towards specific use cases. For example, in Nm'4, the portal was pretty much hard-coded, and looked the same in every installation.

Instead of Appway Screens, Nm'4 had something called "Input Forms".

Nm4's Input Forms were much, much simpler than Appway Screens; basically, they only offered controls (text fields, dropdowns, and so on), some basic layout elements (headers, separators), and the "Replicator", a very simple logic element. Nowadays, we’re used to Appway’s exhaustive list of Screen components, from a simple text field all the way up to a complex border layout, but Nm’4 only provided a scant 19 different "components".

When we originally conceived Appway, we came up with the idea of a generic Screen Business Object. Pretty quickly, we figured out that this meant that we could replace all of the hard-coded stuff in Nm'4 with dynamic Screens; there was no need to have "portals" and "forms" and other such things in Appway. We could have one Screen Business Object, and implement all of Nm'4's specialized parts as Screen Business Objects.

This has many advantages. It makes Appway solutions much more configurable and flexible than Nm'4 solutions ever were. It moves stuff into the model that was previously hard-coded, and puts it under your control. It allows Appway to do much more than Nm'4 ever could — run not just account opening solutions, but also other business applications, our company website and intranet, our Developer portal, and even marcotempest.com.

Other aspects of Nm'4 (Processes, for example) went through a similar evolution. We replaced simple, purpose-specific things with more generic, more powerful Business Objects.

Power and consequences
There's a dark side to all of this, though: Creating solutions in Appway requires more knowledge than it did in Nm'4. Yes, Appway no longer has a hard-coded portal — you can now freely change and adapt it — but that means you have to know how your portal should work, and how to make the corresponding changes in Appway. By making Appway more flexible and more powerful, we also made it a bit harder to use.

Moving a lot of power into the Screen editor had other unintended consequences. It caused solution engineers to start moving business logic into Screens. One of the promises of Appway's model is that you know what's going on in your application. Moving business logic into Screens, unfortunately, runs counter to that. It hides important things at the edges of Appway solutions, inside Scripts attached to Button Actions or Script components, for example, instead of moving it to the surface, where it can easily be measured, tested, and adapted.

And, finally, it caused Screens to bloat in size. Many Screens in modern Appway installations are much, much larger than we ever anticipated.

There's a reason why many solution engineers spend most of their time in the Screen editor: Screens are hard to build, but they contain a lot of the power and logic of many Appway solutions.

One of the things we are working towards is to take a few small steps back to the Nm'4 style of having high-level, purpose-driven Business Objects and components in Appway — but without losing the power Appway currently provides. That’s the reasoning behind much of Appway 6.2’s new Workspace design, and the new components that come with it.

Here are some of the advantages this brings.

1. Better Quality
Having higher-level components improves the quality of Appway solutions. Something like the Data Table or the Workspace Collaboration components would never have been developed on a solution level; both contain years of work, and an incredible amount of expertise.

You get all of this work and expertise for free, and can just drag a single component into a Screen.

2. Getting Business Logic out of Screens
One of the things that can make Appway solutions more difficult to maintain than necessary are business decisions made in the branches of a solution, instead of at its heart. If business logic is in Screens instead of Processes, Data Classes, and other higher-level Business Objects, the logic can become invisible, inconsistent, and hard to control.

Having higher-level components and Business Objects can help pull some of the business logic back up into a more visible area of the Appway model.

3. Less Work
Higher-level components make designing Screens easier and faster. No longer will you have to assemble, say, a header using low-level components like divs. Instead, simply drag the built-in Header component into your Screen, configure it to contain whatever you want it to contain, and you're done.

4. Easier to Use
Purpose-driven components instead of generic components make using the Screen Designer easier. Let's say you're working on a new Appway solution, and you need to set up the basic layout — header, sidebars, things like that. Building that in a solution using low-level components is hard: It requires in-depth knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Appway components, and all kinds of arcane stuff.

Using the Border Layout Manager, on the other hand, and you get all of this – with minimal effort. Drag it into your Screen, change some simple configurations: Done.

Coincidentally, it also makes the Workspace easier to use, because purpose-driven components are perfectly adapted for their use case, and because we invest a lot of time into the design and usability testing of our built-in components — much more than a typical solution ever would.

Semantic Power
Nm4's Input Forms were easy to read. You knew what they contained by looking at them, because you knew what each "thing" inside the Input Form did. With Appway's Screen Business Object, this is no longer always true. Looking at a Screen in the Screen designer often doesn't tell you much about what the Screen actually does, or what it is being used for; the components lack semantics. A div could be anything, for example, and once you start nesting stuff, it gets harder and harder to figure out what a Screen actually does.

Higher-level components have semantic power. They tell you what they are. If a Screen contained a Document Tracker component — which doesn't exist yet, it's just an example — you'd know immediately what it was used for. That's one aspect of what we call "self-documenting solutions".

Having higher-level components also means that you need fewer of them, which, again, makes Screens easier to read and understand.

Tradeoffs
Of course, having higher-level components doesn't just have advantages. The Data Table, for example, gives you very easy access to an incredibly powerful, sophisticated Screen component. But using it also takes a bit of power away from you: You're bound by the properties the component provides, and if you need to change something the component doesn't allow you to change, you're out of luck.

We think this is a tradeoff well worth making, though. While you don't get to control every pixel of your Data Table, or the positioning of every single button, you gain a lot in return.

The Future
Let's take another trip with our time machine. This time, let's travel into the future.

The power Appway provides has been good for our company. We wouldn't have experienced the same kind of growth without it.

But now it's time to start working on getting back some of the simplicity and ease-of-use we've lost. If possible, we'd like to do so without losing any of the power and flexibility we currently have, of course. We think we can achieve both — power and ease-of-use — by moving business logic into more visible areas of Appway, and by offering more powerful, less generic components.

Introducing Workspace Design Notes

Published May 18, 2015 by Lukas Mathis

Workspace

For Appway 6.2, our team of designers worked on streamlining the design of the Appway Workspace. But what do we mean when we refer to the "Workspace"? This post, the first in a series, explains the Workspace concept and the thinking behind it.

If you’ve used PowerPoint, you know that the application has two different modes: the "edit" mode - where you see a list of slides, and can add, edit and remove slides as required; and the "slide show" view, where you actually present your deck. Activate the "slide show" mode, and the normal application window disappears. PowerPoint takes over the whole screen, and starts showing the presentation you’ve built.

Appway works the same way.

The Studio is where you build the solution. Like PowerPoint’s edit mode, this is where you create and delete Business Objects, and make changes to them. This is where you build your Appway solution.

The Workspace is where you run the solution. Like PowerPoint’s presentation mode, this is where you see your work in action, and where end users access your Appway solution.

Appway’s Studio is mostly used by trained developers. The Workspace, on the other hand, is used by a broad range of company employees and company clients. Employees may be new to the company, and not know exactly how everything works yet. Clients expect clear, straightforward forms that do not require them to be in constant contact with the company in order to figure out what is required of them. Employees and clients alike want the same ease of use from Appway as from any other app they use on a daily basis.

This means that Workspace usability is extremely important. Whether a company has built a short simple solution or a large, complex solution, everybody – regardless of their skills or training – should be able to use the Appway Workspace successfully.

That’s why we invest a lot of time into getting the Workspace’s usability right. Appway 6.2 ships with a completely new Workspace design, and includes some completely new components that can be used to build Appway solutions.

In the coming weeks, our series of Workspace Design Notes will talk about various different aspects of the new Workspace design, and introduce the thinking behind some of the changes we’ve made.

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.2

Published May 11, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

The latest patch release, Appway 6.2.2, is available for download. It contains 9 changes, and 25 bugfixes.

The patch release also contains three new features: two related to the Data Table screen component, and one experimental feature for better browser cache control when upgrading to a new version of Appway.

New versions of the following extensions are available for 6.2.2:

AmazonWebServices 2.2.2
ChartingExtension 3.3
ClusterTools 2.1
DefaultIcons 1.1.8
JMXBrowser 1.1.2
JMXLogger 2.1.3
RDBMSEntityStore 1.1
ScreenPdfRenderKit 2.0.28.1

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2.1 to 6.2.2.

More details can be found in the Appway 6.2.2 release notes (PDF).

Announcing the Arrival of Appway 6.2

Published May 4, 2015 by Nina Schneider

Appway Concepts

Today marks the official product release of Appway 6.2.

Appway 6.2 sees a significant increase in performance and robustness. This release introduces a new concept for managing business data, improving performance for solutions with large value stores. More powerful data tables, improved notifications and new high-level components are just a couple of the other areas we've been working on.

Comprehensive Release Notes for Appway 6.2 cover the changes and new features found in the release. Here's a summary of the five major topics we'd like to highlight.

System Performance
System monitoring has been enhanced to better support the administration of critical business applications. A streamlined overview of system health provides you with system-critical information at a glance. New alerts inform you of potential issues before they escalate. We've worked on performance improvements for write operations; sped up and increased the stability of start-up and shut-down procedures, and improved exception handling for the persistency layer. That's not all: We've also focused on improving process locking (to better support processes running concurrently), and introduced an eviction strategy to free memory for installations that rely on many large data handles, such as PDF files.

Entity Management
Appway 6.2 introduces "Entity Management" as an alternative to existing data management concepts you may be using in your solution. The Entity Management concept allows business data to be managed outside of Value Stores, reducing CPU and network usage. It also lets you leverage NoSQL storage technology within your solution.

Data Table
We have implemented many new features requested by our customers. Data tables are now mobile-responsive, with enhanced filtering and sorting capabilities. More powerful than previous iterations, performance has been boosted for increased efficiency.

Workspace Notifications
Workspace notifications were introduced in Appway 6. This latest release builds on feedback to further improve user experience. We've added support for multiple notification inboxes so that different types of notifications (for example, system, collaboration, and process notifications) can be separated.

Workspace Design
If you are planning a new installation and already use IE 8 or above (or an up-to-date version of other common browsers), Appway 6.2 gives you access to new high-level components for template and form design. End users also benefit from a redesigned Workspace. Upgrading will not affect existing solutions, as this functionality is disabled by default. Migration to the new Workspace will be supported with future versions of Appway.

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Upgrading to Appway 6.2: Training
Appway Academy provides a one-day course covering the new features and concepts to get you quickly up to speed on Appway 6.2. Discover the features new with Appway 6.2, understand the impact these features have on development, and discuss information and procedures regarding an upgrade to 6.2.

Main topics covered in the course include:

Screen design
Cluster
Data Management
Workspace Notifications
Web Services
BAM

More information can be found on the 6.2 Upgrade Training page.

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Appway 6.2 Documentation
A summary overview of documentation and other content relating to Appway 6 can be found on the dedicated Appway 6 Resources page. Keep checking back as the page is regularly updated! Furthermore, content can also be filtered on the overview pages using the Version dropdown on the left.

Finally, if you have any questions regarding any of the topics covered in this post, please do not hesitate to contact Appway Support.

Feature in Focus: Integration Link

Published April 27, 2015 by Cate

Integration Link

Integration Link business objects form the interface between Appway and external systems, defining a processing flow for internal or external data.

Event-driven
Integration Links implement event-driven concepts. Events can be triggered internally in Appway, or externally by some other application or the operating system. Integration Links handle an event by processing the event message one component after the other until the end of the link chain is reached.

Integration Links can be used to execute internal tasks from outside, and vice versa.

Process and flow
Using Integration Links as interfaces with external systems bring several advantages. Integration flows are managed outside Appway processes, so that Process business objects only contain business flows. The technical aspects of integration are handled in the Integration Link.

Visibility
Integration points are easier to understand, configure and maintain than in hard-coded scripts. Immediately visible in a Process, you do not have to dig into script tasks and lines of code to discover what has been implemented.

Loosely-coupled infrastructure
Integration Links provide a loosely coupled infrastructure for integration, thus reducing the risk of failure and the cost of maintenance. Integration Links handle dependencies between Appway and external systems such as data format, time and location dependencies.

Asynchronous execution
Integration Links can be executed asynchronously. This is very useful, for example, when dealing with long-running service calls as you can avoid conflicts between write locks and long-running (and thus blocking) service calls. For more information see this recipe.

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How are you using Integration Links in your solution?

Image courtesy Todd Chandler/Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 5.3.15

Published April 20, 2015 by Cate

This week sees the release of Appway 5.3.15. It's a small patch release containing 4 bugfixes, and 1 (non-functional) change.

For more information, please see the Release Notes (PDF).

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 5.3.14 to 5.3.15.

Forum: Help, Ideas and Feedback

Published April 13, 2015 by Cate

Posting in the Developer Forum gives you access to the knowledge and expertise of the Appway Developer community. If searching for answer hasn't been a success, post a new thread and ask the community!

Alistair asked about how to allow parallel approvals of a request. The tricky thing was that there was also a requirement regarding a rejection flow as soon as one of the approvers rejected the request. Urs helped Alistair out — take a look at what he suggested!

Jef asked for input on how to delete items in bulk. He had around 160 business objects that were no longer needed. It's not possible to just select all business objects and delete them in the Studio (as Appway checks for dependencies) — so Jef wanted to know the suggested procedure for geting rid of those objects without having to process them one by one. Mauro and Cate jumped in to help come up with a solution based on lists. How would you approach this issue?

Two community members took the time to provide feedback on how they think Appway, and this Developer platform, could be improved.

Mihai provided five suggestions, from displaying commit comments in various locations in the Appway Studio to showing component information in the Editor.

When it comes to this Developer site, Abhijeet thinks it would be really useful to be able to access a list of all your activities from your own profile.

What do you think could be improved?

Finally, a big thank you to all members of the Developer community for your help, suggestions and questions!

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Image courtesy Tim O'Brien / Flickr

Appway Cluster: Increase Your Expertise

Published April 6, 2015 by Cate

Appway Concepts

System Architecture

Launching this month, Appway Academy's one-day expert training course provides participants with an in-depth understanding of the Appway cluster.

You'll learn about the architecture of the cluster, memory layers, and cluster startup and shutdown operations. Furthermore, you'll also discover best practice when developing cluster solutions and cluster-based extensions. Practical exercises mixed with theory ensure seamless real-world application, with knowledgeable staff on hand to answer any questions you may have.

The first session takes place in Zurich on Thursday, April 30. To register, visit the Cluster Training page.

Participants are expected to have already successfully completed Appway Developer training, and if possible, Appway Administrator training.

As background reading, why not try:

Studio Access and Administration: Who Does What?

Published March 30, 2015 by Urs Spycher

Studio

Access Control

User Management

A recent post in the Forum asked about read-only access to the Appway Studio, noting how useful it would be.

While read-only access is not available, access to the Studio can be adapted to the various use cases you may have. Whether an Administrator is permitted to undertake an activity in the Studio (such as being able to import and export files) depends on the role they have been assigned to.

If no specific roles have been assigned, then all Administrators are able to access all areas of the Studio.

Once one or more Administrators have been assigned to a role, the activities available only to that role are no longer available to Administrators not in that role.

As an example: My imaginary company, ET/CA, has decided that any and all changes to our Appway solution must first go through a specific deployment process. This company deployment process must be strictly adhered to. Therefore, we do not want any Administrators to be able to circumvent this process at any point. On the other hand, our Administrators need to be able to monitor the system and keep an eye on things at all times.

How can we achieve this?

Appway comes with a default set of roles:

For ET/CA, once our development process was finished and it was time to review and deploy the changes made, we used specific roles. We decided to assign all our Administrators to the "Console Administrator" role. Then, we assigned just one Admin to the "Deployment Administrator" and "Composition Administrator" roles.

In practice, this meant that all Administrators could view the Console and monitor our Appway solution. Only the one Admin assigned to the other roles, however, could deploy items and access the Library.

It worked... but was not exactly what we wanted. The "Console Administrator" Administrators could still access the User panel in the Studio, and administer Extensions. We decided to fine-tune our use of these roles even further.

"Super Admin"
One way to control access to the Studio on a highly user-specific level is to create one (or more) "Super Admins" who are assigned to every role. These Administrators face no restrictions in the Studio. All other Administrators, however, are only able to access the sections corresponding to the role(s) they have been assigned to.

If ET/CA chose this route, then those Administrators assigned to the "Console Administrator" role would only be able to access the Console, and nothing else. Our Super Admin, on the other hand, still has access to the whole Studio.

"Configure Additional Roles"
The other way to control access is to create roles with a specific configuration setting. In the Studio, go to Administration > System > Configuration, and choose "Edit Server Configuration" from the dropdown menu.

Add the following configuration:

"nm.auth.roles.additional = DeploymentAdministrator,CompositionAdministrator,ServerAdministrator,ExtensionAdministrator,UserAdministrator,
ConsoleAdministrator,UserAcceptanceTest,LabelManager"

Again, only Administrators assigned to a specific role are allowed to access the relevant areas of the Studio. This setup really only makes sense if you map users to roles via an LDAP integration. Otherwise, as soon as you apply this configuration with all roles, no Administrator is able to do anything anymore in the Studio: they have been effectively "locked out". Still, this configuration may also be suitable even when not LDAP-integrated: Add at least one Admin user to the User Administrator role in order for them to be able to assign other users to the remaining roles.

If ET/CA chose this route, then those Admin users assigned to the "Console Administrator" role would only be able to access the Console, and nothing else.

More information can be found in the Access Control document.

Which way do you think ET/CA should choose?

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Image courtesy Christopher Hawkins / Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 6.2.1

Published March 23, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

The first patch release for Appway 6.2 is now available for download. Appway 6.2.1 fixes some minor issues, the most important being related to colors in the new Workspace. In total, this patch release contains 26 bugfixes and 6 changes.

Colors in the Workspace
Some colors, defined as Color business objects, were not applied properly to Workspace components. This led to browsers replacing such colors with the color black. As a result, validation error messages and error boxes were colored black instead of red. This bug has been fixed, making visual identification of such errors easier.

Extension warnings in the Studio
Another notable change is the way warnings (such as version mismatches) are displayed in the Studio:

New and updated extensions
Two new extensions are available, and eight extensions have been updated.

New extensions:

CassandraHazelcastStore 6.2.1
SPNegoAuthenticator 1.0.4

Updated extensions:

ActionsExtension 2.0.1 -> 2.0.2
ChartingExtension 2.1 -> 3.1
ComponentExtension 6.2.4 -> 6.2.5
JMXBrowser 1.1 -> 1.1.1
OfflineWorklistClient 3.0.2 -> 3.1
PortalWorkList 4.5 -> 4.5.2
RelationalDbHazelcastStore 6.2.5 -> 6.2.7
WebServices 2.2.0 -> 2.2.1

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.2 to 6.2.1. For more information about this release, please see the Appway 6.2.1 Release Notes (PDF).

Learning the Basics: Let Appway Academy Show You How

Published March 16, 2015 by n/A

Appway Concepts

Appway Academy provides a wealth of material and knowledge to help you advance with Appway. We are continuously improving our training materials based on feedback and developments in the software — and, as a result, we're very pleased to announce the launch of our revamped Fundamental training course.

The Appway Fundamental course now takes place over 3 days. It ensures you a have a rock-solid understanding of the Appway basics — you'll learn about the "whats" and "whys" of Appway, alongside the "hows": how to build business processes from scratch using Appway software, for example.

You'll experience a hands-on approach to learning, as our trainers guide you through multiple exercises in an interactive, participatory environment. This course is also suitable for those with a non-technical background.

For more information or to register, visit the Fundamental course page.
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Image courtesy Michael/Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 5.3.14

Published March 12, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

We're happy to announce the release of Appway 5.3.14, a very small patch release containing 4 bugfixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 5.3.13 to 5.3.14.

For more information, please see the Appway 5.3.14 release notes (PDF).

Patch Release: Appway 6.1.9

Published March 9, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

We're happy to announce that Appway 6.1.9 is now available for download. It is a patch release containing 15 bugfixes and 4 changes.

For more detailed information, please see the release notes, available here:
Release Notes 6.1.9 (PDF)

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.1.8 to 6.1.9.

Testing Scalability: The Results

Published March 2, 2015 by Lukas Blunschi

Testing

We want to constantly improve our product's scalability, and our partnership with IBM helps drive this aim forward. The last week of January saw software engineers from Appway visit the IBM Innovation Center in Zürich for the fourth time. Focused on testing the scaling capabilities of the Appway Platform, the results confirmed our expectations.

This post covers the main tests we ran: to investigate whether more nodes could handle a larger load. The load was kept constant, while the number of Appway nodes increased. The tests were run using the Swimworld v1.3.1 solution with 600 concurrent users. Each user had 20 processes running, and a value store size of 64kB. The process length was 5, where "process length" in the context of the Swimworld describes the average number of clicks on "Repeat" on the Screens "Swim1" and "Swim2".

Swimworld 1.3.1
We used one of the standard Appway test solutions, called "Swimworld", to simulate a process in which we can influence the process duration, and the size of the value store.

The model is very simple. It is composed of 2 Process objects ("Portal", and "Swim" with 2 swimlanes) and 3 Screen objects ("Portal", "Swim1", and "Swim2"). The "Portal" Process displays three worklists, plus a button, from which the user can start instances of the "Swim" Process. In the Swim1 Screen, the user defines a message and sets the size of the value store. This step can be repeated n times before moving on to a second user in the other swimlane. The second user sees the content inputted by the first user and can repeat the task or end the process.

In both swimlanes, the amount of repetitions influences the process length (each loop takes an average of 7.5 seconds). Each repetition updates the value store.

Download the "Swimworld" solution (version 1.3.1, for Appway 6.0 and greater): Swimworld v1.3.1

Hardware

Here's the hardware set-up we used:

• 3 physical IBM Blade servers, each with 24 cores (6 CPUs with 4 threads each)
• 2 VMWare virtual machines on each Blade; each virtual machine had 8 cores and 16GB of main memory
• Each virtual machine ran one installation of Appway 6.1.8
• Cluster storage was provided by a relational database located on a separate Blade server

Software

• Virtual machines OS: Red Hat Linux
• Cluster storage: IBM DB2 AWSE 10.5.0.3
• Application server: IBM WebSphere ND 8.5.5.3
• IBM JDK 7
• Appway 6.1.8

Results

We started the tests with one node — and, as expected, the system was not able to handle the load. After adding a second node, the system could handle the load, but we detected problems when it came to the two nodes sustaining such a high load over time.

With three nodes, the system could handle the load fully, and sustainably: CPU usage was 55%, and response times were around 60 ms.

The tests using four, five and six nodes demonstrated an increasingly responsive system in relation to the number of nodes, as well as a constant and consistent reduction in CPU usage.

Conclusion

The results we gained from these tests show that Appway 6 scales with the number of nodes in a cluster. More nodes help to distribute CPU usage, and therefore reduce the individual CPU load per node. To some extent, a lower CPU load also improves response time.

We're looking forward to visiting the Research Labs again in April 2015 to run further tests, so stay tuned!

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Disclaimer: Test results were achieved using specific computer systems and solutions. Any difference in system or solution design or configuration may affect the actual performance. The results provide a benchmark for testing purposes only. Such results should not be used for sizing requirements.

The Bold and the Beautiful: Getting Screen Design Right

Published February 23, 2015 by Cate

Screen Design

If you thought the Developer platform just contained information about how Appway components function, this post is for you: We introduce you to resources covering design ideas and best practice for your Appway App.

Pop-up and stop
We start with the most-viewed recipe in our whole Cookbook, "Replacing Modal Windows". This recipe discusses the drawbacks of using modal windows in your app, and also provides six design patterns as alternatives. If modal windows really are unavoidable, the recipe also contains guidelines to minimize their impact on user experience.

OK, Cancel, Next?
Buttons seem simple. Often, they're not. Buttons are how people navigate through your app; when you get them wrong, you're breaking a fundamental aspect of your app. Discover tips for success in "Working with Buttons".

What's a Pixel?
The answer to this question isn't as simple as you would imagine! So, delving deeper into DPIs, devices and density, this recipe explains what you should keep in mind when entering pixel values into Appway Screen component property fields.

Not as Easy as it Looks
Designing a Screen that is useful and clear for its intended audience is not always easy. Often, the logic of a Screen implies some kind of hierarchy — but implementing this hierarchy visually can be tricky. The suggestions provided in the "Designing Visual Hierarchies" recipe guide you through creating clean and easily understandable Screens.

Text Making Sense
Great pointers as to how text should be included in Screens are found in the "12 Copywriting Tips" recipe. From checkbox labels, to instructions, to validation warnings, whether users can successfully use your app often comes down to whether they read and understand these small pieces of text.

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Are there other design topics you'd like covered here on Appway Developer? Do you have any design tips you'd like to share? Let us know in the comments below.

Program, Interrupted: Breakpoints

Published February 16, 2015 by Cate

Diagnosis

When things are not behaving as they should, breakpoints are a useful tool to help focus any debugging investigations. A breakpoint is an intentional stopping or pausing place, and therefore a means of acquiring knowledge about a program during its execution.

Use of the term "bug" has been traced back to Thomas Edison, who in 1889 used the word to imply "that some imaginary insect ... secreted itself inside [a phonograph] and is causing all the trouble." The more modern usage is thought to have been popularized by a team working on the Mark II Relay Calculator with Grace Murray Hopper at Harvard: On investigating why operations were being impeded, they discovered an actual bug — a moth — in a relay. In removing it, the operators really had debugged the machine.

Breakpoints in Appway
You can set breakpoints in the script language and on process tasks within Appway after configuring breakpoint support in the Studio. An overview of all existing (active and disabled) breakpoints is available from the "Breakpoints" tab found under "Administration > System > Script Language".

The "Enable breakpoints" recipe guides you through setting up and using breakpoints, step by step.

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Image courtesy Nicola Sapiens De Mitri / Flickr

Learning about Labels

Published February 9, 2015 by n/A

Labels

Studio

Our first tutorial of 2015 has now been released! Created by Appway Academy, the latest tutorial in the "Studio Essentials" series, "Using Labels for multi-language applications", guides you through the various ways you can create and edit Labels.

Labels are an efficient way of enabling internationalization of your solution: You can add translations for text found in the Portal. As an example, the text in a Screen may read, "First name" and "Last name". If this text has been created using Labels, a user with the language preference set to English still sees, "First name" and "Last name". But if the language preference of the user is set to German, the same text is then displayed as "Vorname" and "Nachname", if a German translation has been provided for the Labels.

Labels also allow the enforcement of consistent naming conventions across an application. Always using the same Label for "Client" means standardized wording — otherwise it may be that one developer on your project enters "Customer" while another enters "Client".

Have you watched the tutorial? What other topics do you think should be covered by tutorials this year?

Patch Release: Appway 5.3.13

Published February 2, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

PDF Rendering

Screen Rendering

A new patch release for Appway 5.3 is available: 5.3.13

This patch release contains 12 bugfixes and two changes. The main areas covered by this release relate to PDF Output Tables, security, and HTML screen rendering.

One group of changes covers improvements to the rendering of PDF Output Tables:

Vertical alignment
Page replication
StackOverflowError prevention

A second group covers security issues:

Upgrade of the Bouncy Castle Crypto API library
Integration of OWASP ESAPI library
Improved WebSphere compatibility

An important fix has been made in the HTML screen rendering logic. Because of a race condition between the rendering code of the template screen component and value store persistence, it was possible that scopes and variables for process tokens on screen tasks were lost.

This problem is more likely to occur if you have slow screens. If you get random "Variable $x is not defined" error messages in the Workspace which can be solved by restarting the process token, you should consider upgrading to this new release.

The full release notes are available here: Release Notes 5.3.13 (PDF)

Patch Release: Appway 6.1.8

Published January 26, 2015 by Stephan Markwalder

We're happy to announce that Appway 6.1.8 is now available for download. It is a small patch release containing 8 bugfixes and 3 changes.

For more detailed information, please see the release notes, which are available here: Release Notes 6.1.8 (PDF)

Data-driven Decisions

Published January 19, 2015 by Cate

BAM

The opening line of a 2006 book called "Why Collect Data?" states the obvious: "The need for accurate information is critical." This sentiment is complemented by the opening line of an article from the Harvard Business Review (2012): "You can't manage what you don't measure." Blend them together, and you get the essence of Business Activity Monitoring (BAM): Accurately measuring and collecting data to support management decisions and priorities.

Visibility and decisions
A 2014 research report from the Aberdeen Group notes that:

"If decision-makers do not have ongoing visibility into operations, as well as the ability to measure processes' effectiveness, any changes that are made may not be truly effective. At the same time, lack of visibility into processes excludes managers from understanding what is going on at any given time and reacting in an agile manner to promote efficiency and better serve customers."

In short, in order to innovate and update, you need visibility. McKinsey agree: "[S]ophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision-making."

Appway BAM provides you with this visibility. When processes and activities are executed in the workspace, Appway BAM measures and saves all the processes and activities previously marked. Measurement includes all runtime information about when a process/activity was started, who worked on it, when it was completed and so on.

Additional key performance indicators for a specific process type and/or domain can also be created.

Visualizing data
Effective visualization helps make complex data more accessible, understandable and usable. Appway BAM Dashboards visualize the data collected, providing a rich interface for monitoring and analyzing critical information. Rather than relying on intuition or opinion-based decisions, you can identify bottlenecks and optimization points in the process, and start a new design iteration towards optimal process efficiency.

Read the BAM documentation for more information, or attend the next BAM training.

The closing line goes to the Harvard Business Review:
"The evidence is clear: Data-driven decisions tend to be better decisions."

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Image courtesy Kevin Dooley / Flickr

Across Platforms, Download Files: A PDF

Published January 9, 2015 by Cate

Looking at the results of the most searched-for terms on Developer during 2014, we discovered that "PDF" came out at number eight on the list. This isn't surprising given the dominance of the Portable Document Format (PDF) as a cross-platform, browser-independent file format.

Back in 1991, John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems, outlined a project known as "Camelot", with the aim of solving the problem of communicating visual material between different computer applications and systems:

What industries badly need is a universal way to communicate documents across a wide variety of machine configurations, operating systems and communication networks. These documents should be viewable on any display and should be printable on any modern printers. If this problem can be solved, then the fundamental way people work will change.

I would argue that his last sentence is correct, and the solution, PDF, has indeed had an incredible impact!

From its release in 1993 until 2008, PDF was a proprietary format controlled by Adobe. On July 1, 2008, however, PDF 1.7 was officially released as an open standard, ISO 32000-1:2008, with Adobe relinquishing control to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The same year, Adobe published a public patent license for this ISO standard, granting royalty-free rights to every individual and organization in the world "to make, have made, use, sell, import and distribute" PDFs.

Fulfilling Warnock's vision, with the explosive growth of the Internet, "PDF has become one of the most common formats for document exchange, widely used in all professional and personal contexts". (ISO, July 2008). A very, very rough search demonstrates that around 75% of all electronic documents on the web are indeed PDFs.

Competitors to PDF, such as DjVu, or Microsoft's XPS (now OXPS) format, exist. Do you think that PDF is going to be overtaken in the near future?

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Recipes
Create a Simple, Rule-based PDF Report
Page numbering in PDF documents
Changing or Updating PDF Output Fields

Be More Productive with Appway: Three More Ways

Published January 5, 2015 by Cate

Studio

Usability

Back in October we published our first post on tricks and lesser-known features of the Appway Studio. The start of 2015 is a great time to share three more ways you could use to boost your efficiency with Appway.

1. Fast Track

The first feature on our list, Fast Track, is actually a suggestion from a Community member in response to our previous post on productivity.

Fast Track is a text-based user interface that you can enter at any time in the Studio by hitting the Escape button on your keyboard. From the Fast Track screen you can easily create, open, or run Business Objects; restart extensions; see your recently used Business Objects; see active Business Object locks, and more — all by typing a few simple commands.

2. Ctrl+Alt: Show structure

Here's another keyboard shortcut (for Windows): Instead of having to open the Admin bar at the top of the screen in order to show the structure of the Screen, you can simply hold Ctrl+Alt while mousing over the screen.

The same combination also works for Mac users.

3. Smart Lists

Our final tip in this edition is on using Smart Lists in the Studio.

Lists are collections of items arranged according to your needs, with the items added manually.

Smart Lists, on the other hand, are based on rules which target which items should be included in that specific Smart List. Smart Lists are identified by the hash-like (#) symbol on the label.

Creating a Smart List is similar to creating a standard List:
1. In the Studio, go to Library>Lists
2. Right-click on the "List" tab heading
3. Select "Add Smart List" from the dropdown menu

Smart Lists can be configured in multiple ways according to your needs, and can include scripts.

As an example, the "Default Lists" category in the Studio is made up of Smart Lists, such as "My Changes" or "Uncommitted Objects".

Note the difference between the Smart Lists, identified by the hash-like symbol, and standard Lists with no symbol.

A recipe on how to use Smart Lists for simple quality checks is available here.

We'd love to hear more of your time-saving tips and tricks — get in touch via the comments below and your idea may end up in the next edition!

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Image courtesy Brian Talbot / Flickr

Happy New Year from Appway

Published December 29, 2014 by Cate

To all of our community members celebrating the arrival of 2015 — a very happy new year from the Appway Developer team!

We are hard at work planning and developing new features for the Developer Community and look forward to sharing these with you in the coming year.

So make sure to come back regularly to discover what we've been up to, and share your ideas and successes with other community members!

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Image courtesy Mike Bitzenhofer / Flickr

Developer: Best of 2014

Published December 22, 2014 by Cate

Screen Design

This year has been a busy year on Appway Developer — from the great recipes and documentation produced to following the informative discussions in the Forum, we hope there was something useful for everyone.

See what we think are some highlights of 2014 below: what content would you recommend to members of the Developer Community?

Community
We've had the honor of welcoming over 170 new members to the Developer Community since January 2014! Our Academy delivered over 1300 hours of training to 400+ trainees, and expanded the courses to include Integration, and Appway 6.

Cookbook
Our cookbook is bursting with recipes! We've published over 60 new recipes this year, covering a wide variety of topics. While the five most popular recipes (listed below) cover aspects of Screen design, members of the Developer Community have also been busy cooking up great content on paginating tables, portal screen popups, and PDFs, to name a few.

Here's the top five recipes of 2014:

Which recipe is your favorite? Let us know in the comments below!

Blog
We've diversified the content on our blog this year to include more than just the latest patch release announcements. Developer Community member L. Mathis wrote about 'responsive design', while T. Suter wrote a two-part series about 'databases and the future'.

We gathered a couple of ideas from the team about how to be more productive using Appway, and suggested some tips and tricks on using the Portal Worklist extension.

What would you like featured on the blog? Let us know!

Documentation
We published documentation on many topics over the course of 2014, and have much more on the way for next year. We highly recommend reading through all the following pieces — but if you've only got time for one, we'd suggest "Data Management".

Data Management
This document describes how Appway organizes and stores business data in the short and long term. Data Class business objects form an app's data model. When the app is executed, Appway stores data in a Value Store for the duration of a Process instance. If a piece of information needs to live beyond this timeframe, it can be stored in a relational or non-relational database.

System Installation (Appway 6)
The Appway Platform is a web application that runs on a Java application server. It can be installed on a single server, or on multiple nodes to run as a cluster. It requires a local file system for each node and, in the case of a multi-node installation, a shared storage solution. The shared storage can be a shared file system, a relational database or an Apache Cassandra database.

System Migration: Single node to multi-node
This guide explains the steps necessary to migrate from a single-node to a multi-node Appway installation (Appway 6.0 and above). Areas which require particular attention include job scheduling, caching behavior and file management.

Forum
The Forum is where you can ask questions, get assistance and help others with their Appway solution. There have been over 120 discussions started this year on a wide range of topics. Here's a couple we picked out that caught our eye:

1. Cluster - Identify Node for a Given Process
2. Portal Page Issue
3. Workspace CSS Version
4. How to Change the Content of a Catalog Programatically
5. What replaces UseValueStore() following its deprecation in Appway 6?

We hope you value being part of the Developer Community and would love to hear any feedback, suggestions or other ideas you may have!

Workspace Collaboration — Release Highlights

Published December 15, 2014 by tschofen

Team Collaboration

We're excited to announce the release of Workspace Collaboration, a new product that provides a collaboration layer for Appway's Workspace.

Context-based message feeds and instant messaging functionality can easily be added to your Appway applications using Workspace Collaboration’s Screen Components and Script Functions. Notifications informing users about relevant messages can also be implemented, supporting real-time communication.

With Workspace Collaboration, users can communicate in a structured and transparent way in the context of their work. Furthermore, users' communication history can be archived along with the process or case data, useful for audit trail and knowledge management purposes.

The key features of Appway Workspace Collaboration include:

Discussion

Message bus with index of all discussions
Discussion List component to show discussions matching a given filter and sent replies
New Post Field component to post messages, which supports mentions, links, and hashtags
Script Functions to automatically post messages and fetch discussions
Option to register callbacks to react to new messages (e.g. to send notifications)

Chat

Chat system with persistent messages
Context-based group Chat components that can be placed on any screen
Script Functions to automatically send and fetch messages
An invitation mechanism to allow users to invite additional users to a chat
Option to integrate with third-party instant messaging systems via additional extensions

Workspace Collaboration is an optional module for the Appway platform. It consists of a back end in the Appway core, and Screen Components and other objects in the WorkspaceCollaboration extension.

For in-depth information, check out the product documentation.

Patch Release: Appway 6.1.7

Published December 12, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

Extensions

Process Activities

We're happy to announce that Appway 6.1.7 is now available.

It is a small bugfix release with 21 bugfixes, 5 changes and 2 features.

Here's a roundup of the most important items in this release:

If Appway fails to load or start a plug-in extension on startup, the complete startup procedure is aborted. This prevents Appway from running without a connection to the cluster storage in case the plug-in extension "RelationalDbHazelcastStore" or "CassandraHazelcastStore" could not be started.
The workspace no longer shows a JavaScript error message if a page submit is triggered while an Ajax update request is in progress.
The configuration property "nm.diskspace.enabled" (default value "true") can be used to disable all Appway components which collect information about total, used or free disk space. This may solve performance issues on installations where the data home is located on a slow network drive.
If an HTTP request or background job modifies more than two process instances without committing them individually, a warning will be written to the log. This may help to identify locations where process instances are handled by batch operations in a way that could impact stability and performance of the installation.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.1.6 to 6.1.7.

For further information on this release, please see the Appway 6.1.7 release notes.

Activity and Analysis: Benefit from BAM

Published December 8, 2014 by Cate

BAM

Using data provided via business activity monitoring tools enables an enterprise to make better-informed business decisions, address problem areas quickly, and re-position itself to take full advantage of emerging opportunities.

Appway BAM provides managers with real-time visibility and process control over Appway instances: By monitoring business data and events, managers can identify process issues and successes and initiate action as appropriate.

Appway BAM includes out-of-the-box dashboards with aggregation and drill-down features, advanced filtering, and a rich user interface with clickable charts.

Behind the scenes, you can easily configure Service Level Agreements to monitor the duration of processes and activities. You can also customize business KPIs for advanced filtering and reporting.

Want to find out more?

Training
BAM training is divided into two sessions: Fundamental and Developer. In the Fundamental morning session (targeted at business analysts and developers), you'll learn the goals and usage steps of the product, explore dashboards and reporting, and discuss SLAs and KPIs.

The afternoon Developer session is intended for those developing with BAM. Discover the architecture and components found in BAM, examine configuration options, and explore how to customize out-of-the-box BAM dashboards.

The next BAM courses are on 29 January 2015 and 19 February 2015. Register here.

Databases and the Future (Part 2)

Published December 1, 2014 by Thomas Suter

Data Management

In my previous post, I discussed relational database management systems and NoSQL stores. While there has been progress in this field, I believe we need to go further, focusing on the meaning of data. The future? It's called Semantic Web.

Rigidity and scalability are not the only concerns when it comes to database management: Today we face an additional problem related to data.

Every time we deal with a specific domain we reinvent the model for that domain. And we are doing a poor job when reinventing, by neglecting the meaning of data.

Imagine a system that knows what your data is about. A system that can handle similar models, and allows you to query data in a federated environment.

If you need to store data, you first search for an existing domain model. You would then take that model, adapt it where necessary, and make the data available to everyone who needs the same information. Data would be referenceable; a simple link would take you to the information you need. A query language would allow you to search for data pattern.

This technology exists
It's called Semantic Web and uses ontologies to define domain data, data structure, and the relations between data. This technology allows us to do graph pattern-matching with a query language called SPARQL, and can also be used to make inferences from our data.

"[T]he Semantic Web…has grown from an abstract futuristic vision, mainly existing in the head of its inspirer, Tim Berners-Lee, into an ever-approaching reality of a global web of interlinked data with well-defined meaning." – Spanos, Stavrou and Mitrou (Semantic Web, 2012:3(2))

The idea is not new, but advances in storage technology and overall hardware power have increasingly made it a usable, practical reality. The industry is now going through a paradigm shift. It is not enough to simply get hold of lots of data: We need to be able to analyze it, find answers to questions, and infer and interpolate where necessary.

Game changer
A practical example is the automatic recontextualization of information the BBC uses to build their web pages. The BBC web server finds relevant articles and pieces of information in BBC knowledge bases, and presents that information in a specific context: on the football team overview page, for example, or on a team's dedicated page.

Screenshot of the BBC's overview page for Chelsea Football Club, 26 Nov 2014

Similar efforts can be witnessed on the BBC Music and the BBC Programmes pages.

A case study provided to W3C in 2010 by BBC engineers highlighted that "Creating web identifiers for every item the BBC has an interest in, and considering those as aggregations of BBC content about that item, allows us to enable very rich cross-domain user journeys. This means BBC content can be discovered by users in many different ways, and content teams within the organization have a focal point around which to organize their content."

A number of large companies are already using Semantic Web technology successfully in their software and this trend will only increase. As InformationWeekly noted back in 2012, "In much the same way that consumerization drives innovation in end user computing, semantic database technologies deliver benefits that businesses of all stripes should be exploiting."

What's your take on Semantic Web technology?

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Image courtesy Jackman Chiu / Flickr

Databases and the Future (Part 1)

Published November 24, 2014 by n/A

Data Management

When running a process, it's rather important to have somewhere to store the relevant data. This could be in a value store, but if longer-term data persistence is required, it's likely you'll rely on a database. This post covers traditional databases and hints at what's next.

Short term and carefree
By default, Appway manages all Data Entities in a container called "Value Store". Data related to a Process instance is stored for the duration of that instance. Once the end of the Process is reached, the data for that instance is deleted automatically.

The Value Store persists any object graphs, a wonderful feature which allows you to focus on what the data is about, what relations between the different concepts exists, how the concept hierarchy looks like and how entities are interconnected. There's no need to care about specific value sizes: You do not have to define if a person's surname has 50 or 150 characters, or whether UTF-8 or ASCII or an ISO-8891 charset is used for storage. The Value Store takes care of that.

Everything just falls into place … until you have to persist data for a longer time, beyond the length of the process. Then what?

Persistence and rigidity
The industry came up with a solution for longer-term data persistence decades ago: relational database management systems (RDBMS). Hardware limitations had a huge impact on the development of this technology: Memory was expensive 20 years ago. RDBMS therefore mostly deals with how large your data is, and how fast it can be retrieved from cheap disk space.

In RDBMS you need to define tables of equal sized rows. Each row may be split in an equal number of columns, but they must have a fixed size.

The devotion to a pre-ordained structure has benefits: an RDBMS set-up allows engineers to create high-performance data retrieval mechanisms. Flexibility, however, suffers. If lots of information only takes up a couple of hundred bytes, but the outlier — with a few thousand bytes — must be captured as well… you have to define a column which is large enough for the outlier, wasting space. Modern databases can deal with this in more efficient ways, but the initial problem is still there: Data is given a fixed size and a fixed structure.

A database schema defines what data may be stored to a specific database; more precisely, to a specific database table. This isn't an issue when the data is really uniform. But when you have lots of different data, you have to define specific tables for each data type. Engineers have to create a data model that fits current needs, is efficient, and can hold the structures required — but then also anticipate future changes to the data, because every change in data structures or types requires a change in the database schema.

As former IBM executive Jnan Dash notes, "This 'get it right first' approach may have worked in the old world of static schema, but it will not be suitable for the new world of dynamic schema, where changes need to be made daily, if not hourly, to fit the ever changing data model."

So what's next?

The sequel to SQL
Industry came up with yet another concept and called it key-value stores, a very simple approach in which you store a value for a specific key. This kind of data structure is very easily distributed and thus fits nicely in a cluster environment. Nowadays known as "NoSQL stores", they can deal with very, very large amounts of data while also embracing data versatility.

The price of this flexibility comes in the form of 'query-ability': Huge, variously-structured datasets cannot easily be queried. As a work-around, large data warehouses do nightly processing of their data to create indexes in RDBMS or other systems — or it may suffice to remember a root key, which then allows a system to efficiently retrieve data in an incremental way.

Is this the future? No. It's a stepping stone along the way. Read my next post to find out what I consider to be the direction we're heading in.

Note: Within Appway, the Data Store extension provides a tool for mapping Appway Data Classes to an RDBMS system, handling the creation and alteration of table definitions and dealing with storage and loading.

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Image courtesy tec_estromberg / Flickr

Cookbook: Contributions Welcome!

Published November 17, 2014 by Cate

The Appway Cookbook contains over 150 recipes filled with useful tips, tricks and guidance. Recipes cover a wide range of themes, from choosing which Screen components best fit your use case, to script functions and upgrading. What have you been cooking up with Appway? We'd love to hear about it!

Everyone is encouraged to write and share their own recipes — community member Karan recently added his own contributions to the Cookbook, as did Professional Services team member Christophe and Appway's Head of R&D, Oliver.

Recipes are a great way of sharing what you've learnt while working with Appway, and give other members of the Developer Community a taste of what can be done.

Simply sign in to get started!

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Image courtesy Paul D'Ambra / Flickr

Studio Feature: Interactive Script Editor

Published November 10, 2014 by Cate

Studio

Script Language

Appway has its own special script language, used to generate and support Processes and Screens. The script language is also used to bind data in screens and documents, define conditions and take decisions on actions within a process. The Interactive Script Editor is the place where you can write, validate and execute scripts — and save them for future use.

This Editor allows you to write and execute Appway scripts outside of a process context. Two features in particular are worth highlighting: context help, and the snippet library. The context help pane shows the available data class properties and function documentation. The code snippet library contains code fragments that you can insert into a script, or around a selection, saving you time in future: add your own snippet to build your own custom resource.

There's an introductory video to the Interactive Script Editor created by Appway Academy, and a comprehensive discussion of the script language itself in our Documentation.

Have you tried creating your own script function yet? A script function is a reusable section of code available globally in the Appway studio. Appway inserts the skeleton structure and function body, which you then need to modify.

Or if you're a more advanced user: Have you tried building a script function validator?

Patch Release: Appway 6.1.6

Published November 3, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

We're happy to announce that Appway 6.1.6 is here!

This patch release contains 18 bugfixes, 4 changes and 2 features compared to our previous release, Appway 6.1.5.

The three most important items in this release are:

A bugfix for a deadlock which occurred when refactoring a data class with self-references in one of its functions
Appway no longer keeping old versions of profile pictures as cluster files
The configuration property "nm.diskspace.job.paused" can now be used to disable the built-in "Low Disk Space Check" job

This release is compatible with the latest version of the Default Icons extension.

For more detailed information, see the release notes (PDF).

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) 3.1 — Release Highlights

Published October 27, 2014 by Laura Monetti

BAM

We’re happy to announce the launch of BAM version 3.1 for Appway 6.1.

Selected highlights from this latest Appway BAM extension release are outlined below. For more in-depth information on the product as a whole, check out the product documentation. For a comprehensive list of new and updated features, see the full release notes (PDF).

New features in BAM 3.1

Saving activity participants' history: BAM records the list of participant reassignments for an activity, and displays this information in the dashboards. If a Screen or sub-process is reassigned from one user to another, for example, BAM records this, along with the amount of time the activity was assigned to each user. This allows for a more detailed breakdown of the total time spent on the task with respect to the SLA.

Exclusion of weekends and holidays from SLAs: You can configure BAM to exclude weekends and public holidays from process and activity SLA calculation.

Optimization of KPI storage: BAM trackpoints are now saved directly to the BAM database, without using process instance and token attributes. This avoids excessive memory consumption should a large number of BAM KPIs be necessary. If required, you can enable saving of standard instance/token attributes as BAM KPIs to mimic the behavior of versions 2.0 and 3.0 of the BAM extension.

Publishing filters: You can publish a saved filter to a group or role in the BAM dashboards. This makes the saved filter available to all users in the selected group or role.

Entitlements on process list: Access to BAM data from a specific process can be restricted to a set of defined users, groups and/or roles.

Dashboard internationalization: In addition to English, BAM dashboards are now available in German, French and Italian.

Support for additional Database Management Systems: BAM 3.1 supports DB2 as a storage technology alongside the already supported Oracle, MySQL and SQLServer systems.

The next available BAM Training Course is on Thursday, 20 November. Click here for more information.

Three Ways to Be More Productive Within Appway

Published October 20, 2014 by Cate

Studio

We quickly put our heads together here at Appway HQ to come up with some simple ways you could improve your productivity within Appway. We decided on three key topics: favorites, names and labels. Read on to find out more!

1. Favorites
Did you know that you can bookmark your most-used Screen components?

Simply drag and drop the components to your "Favorites" area in the Screen Editor. These components will then be at hand when you start editing other screens, too.

More:
Cookbook – Screen Design Productivity Tips
Cookbook – Migrate Screen Editor Favorites

2. Names
Taking a little bit of time to really think through how you name things can save a lot of time in the future.

It's difficult to make changes to the ID of an object after it's been created. While you can change the (display) name of most business objects at any given time, you very often have to refer to the ID of an object in your implementation.

We therefore strongly recommend using these conventions when naming all Business Objects in Appway:

Use clear, descriptive names a business audience understands
Do not use special characters
Business Object IDs should use PascalCase (also known as Upper Camel Case): "StartAccountOpening", "TimeTrackerReport"
Data Class Functions and Data Class Attributes should use Camel Case: "externalEmployee", "getAllAccountTypes()"
Label names should be all lowercase, and separated by dots: [LABEL:insert.name], [LABEL:kyc.check]

More:
Cookbook – Naming Conventions

3. Labels
Labels are used to translate text shown in the Portal into different languages. This provides flexibility when translating UIs into other languages, and also allows the enforcement of consistent naming conventions across the application. Always using the same Label for "Client" means standardized wording — otherwise one team member may enter "Customer" while another enters "Client".

It is a good practice to categorize the Label IDs according to Business Object or context type: "button.back" and "button.next" would be for labels used on buttons, while "catalog.country.ch", "catalog.country.de" would be labels used in the context of catalogs.

More:
Forum – Label IDs: Best Practice?
Cookbook – Delete all translation text for a label
Documentation – Languages and Labels
Tutorial –Using Labels for multi-language applications

How have you improved your productivity within Appway? Let us know in the comments below!

Next: Be More Productive with Appway: Three More Ways
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Image courtesy Brian Talbot / Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 6.1.5

Published October 13, 2014 by n/A

We've issued a patch release containing many bug fixes, some changes and small new features. Appway 6.1.5 contains an important security update: Please upgrade your system as soon as possible.

Changes in this release focus on improving the system's performance and administration tools. For example, you can now view input/output statistics in the Studio (Administration > System > I/O Statistics).

For more information, please see the full Release Notes 6.1.5 (PDF)

At the same time, we've also issued patch releases for earlier Appway branches (5.1, 5.2 and 5.3). They contain some bug fixes and an important security update. See the full release notes below for details:
Release Notes 5.3.12 (PDF)
Release Notes 5.2.3.10 (PDF)
Release Notes 5.1.1.t (PDF)

Get Certified — Practitioner, Professional or Master!

Published October 6, 2014 by Cate

There are three certification levels, with an increasing level of difficulty: Practitioner, Professional and Master.

Practitioner
A certified Practitioner can create and modify scripts and data classes, design medium-complexity screens and has a firm grasp of rules regarding document generation.

If you've completed Fundamental Training and have three months' experience with Appway, take the Practitioner exam to demonstrate what you know.

Practitioner certification is a prerequisite for all Professional-level exams.

Professional (Business Analyst / Developer / Administrator)
Appway Professional certification is split into three streams: Business Analyst, Developer, and Administrator.

Business Analyst certification requires good knowledge of best practices around requirements management for an Appway project, the ability to use the process editor's advanced modeling features and create screen and rule mock-ups. Analysts should have 12 months' project experience with Appway.

Developer certification tests your knowledge of advanced process, screen and data model design and your ability to adapt solutions to technical and business requirements. It also examines your integration experience using the SOAP and REST extensions. Developers should have 12 months' project experience with Appway.

Administrator certification is for experienced Appway Server Administrators. You can run an Appway environment from the installation phase to the ongoing maintenance phase, taking responsibility for configuration changes, deployments and incident troubleshooting? Then this is the exam for you.

Master
The Appway Master certification program tests problem-solving abilities and knowledge of the architecture, components, and extensions. Taken over half a day, the exam includes a presentation and case study.

Are you ready to demonstrate what you can do with Appway?
More information can be found on the Academy page.

Platforms, Screens and User Experience

Published September 29, 2014 by Lukas Mathis

Adaptive Design

Screen Design

Screen Structure

Appway believes that responsive design is the future of the web, with screen components designed to help you provide a seamless, consistent experience across devices. It does not make sense to invest months on pixel-perfect designs that target one particular screen size, in one particular browser, on one particular operating system – yet look scruffy in all other environments.

In Appway, the Grid Layout, Adaptive Flow Layout and Border Layout Manager are just a couple of the responsive screen components available to help you ensure your apps work anywhere and everywhere.

But what is responsive design and why is it even an issue?

Responsive design refers to websites designed to adjust to various screen sizes, screen resolutions, and device types, eliminating the need for separately designed and implemented 'desktop' and 'mobile' versions of an app. This allows you to deliver a consistent experience for users who, as an Inc.com article reminds us, "are browsing across multiple devices. Instead of having them zoom excessively or pinch their screens…you're giving them an easier-to-absorb website." It's worth mentioning that consistency is key: If the user experience "isn't consistent across channels, users will question the organization's credibility." (Nielsen Norman Group, 2013).

Using responsive design means you only need implement your apps once. Your users only need to learn how to use it once; they can then apply that knowledge across multiple devices, in an app that looks right on each of these devices.

Responsive design is increasing in importance thanks to the proliferation of smartphones and tablets – desktop and laptop computers are no longer the only way many people access information. And, as Richard Absalom, an analyst at Ovum, notes, "Trying to stand in the path of consumerised mobility is likely to be a damaging and futile exercise."

User Experience

W3C's 'One Web' recommendations state that "while services may be most appropriately experienced in one context or another, it is considered best practice to provide as reasonable experience as is possible given device limitations and not to exclude access from any particular class of device, except where this is necessary."

We believe that instead of pixel-perfect control over each and every element on a screen, you should concentrate on designing user interactions: Screens should contain the logic of what should be displayed, and leave Appway to dynamically change the visual design based on the device the Screen is shown on.

The idea is neither to design mobile first, nor to design desktop first. The idea is to design Business Logic first, and let Appway make sure that it works well on all devices. This saves you time and money when creating an app in Appway, allows employees to work whenever and wherever they want, and provides a clear path forward — your app doesn’t only support current devices, but future devices as well.

What's your take on responsive design and user experience?

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Image courtesy Arne Kuilman / Flickr

Data and Scripting Basics

Published September 22, 2014 by Cate

Data Classes

Script Language

Screen Data and Scripting

Data and scripts are crucial building blocks of your Appway solution. Proper data management is key, making sure that the data model accurately describes how data is organized, with clear relationships between pieces of information. When it comes to data management it is also important to think about the data life cycle, where the data is stored, how long it will be stored there, how it gets cleaned up.

"Data Class" business objects describe the data in your app and form its data model. Data classes allow you to create and manage complex structures of entities and their attributes. The "Create a Data Class" video guides you through the basic steps.

Read our Data Classes: Best Practice guidelines for suggestions on how to manage data classes in an efficient and streamlined way.

Scripts
If you want to define and manipulate instances of your data model, then you need to use expressions and scripts.

The Appway Script Language is an object-oriented, strongly typed, interpreted script language that supports the creation of new data classes, primitive types, functions, and class methods.

You can use the Interactive Script Editor to write and execute Appway scripts outside the context of a process. Our "Using the Interactive Script Editor" video tutorial gives you a short introduction — and also highlights the code snippet library, where you can save code fragments for reuse.

If you need to reuse more than small snippets, you can also create your own Script Functions: reusable sections of code available globally in the Appway Studio. Appway automatically creates the skeleton Script Function structure, which you then need to modify. Watch "Create a Script Function" to find out more.

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Image courtesy ArtfulMagpie / Flickr

All About Appway 6

Published September 15, 2014 by Emilie Boillat

System Upgrade

Extensions

You can now find all technical resources about Appway 6 in one place. We've gathered documentation, recipes, tutorials and more on changes and new features in a single overview.

Resources are currently available on:

Upgrading to Appway 6
System installation and administration
Adaptive Screen design
New and improved Screen elements
Managing business data
Portal Worklists
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
and more to come...

Major Appway 6 novelties include mobile responsiveness and support for multi-node architectures. Features incompatible with cluster environments or mobile devices have been replaced and require adjustments during the upgrade process.

To enable clustered set-ups, Business Objects and runtime process data are now stored in a virtual Cluster Storage directory, which can be located on a shared file system, an SQL database or Apache Cassandra.

Several new or improved Screen components are available to steer your app's layout. They automatically adapt to the size of the display device. There are also several new or improved components to manage images and icons, and to guide users through your interface.

Finally, the Portal Worklist and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) extensions have both been significantly enhanced for Appway 6.

Find out more among the wealth of Appway 6 resources available.

Integration Training — New at Appway Academy

Published September 8, 2014 by Cate

Integration Link

Integration Extensions

Appway contains many components you can use when building processes and screens. But do you know which component provides a visual way to connect to a web service or database, and which serves as an abstraction layer for integration with other technologies?

If you said, "Integration Link" you'd be correct. This component is just one of the many topics covered during a new one-day Integration module, which will be part of Advanced Developer Training as of the Chiasso October 2014 course.

After covering the Datastore Extension, Entity Store and databases, you'll move on to integrating SOAP and REST Web Services, as well as learning about file manipulation.

The module continues with the Mail Extension and the Integration Link component, and includes example use cases so you can put what you've learnt into practice.

Find out more about the course and sign up on the Advanced Developer Training page.

How Can I ... ? Try the Forum!

Published September 1, 2014 by Cate

The Appway Developer Forum is where you can ask questions, discuss best practice and help out other members of the Appway community by sharing your knowledge. Developers and consultants here at Appway, alongside members of the Appway Developer community, provide answers or guidance on whatever issues, problems or questions you may have.

If you've already consulted the technical documentation and Cookbook and still not found your answer, try posting your question in the Forum. Topics are organized by category — from Scripting, to Architecture, to Ask Anything; choose the most appropriate topic and ask away!

Here's a selection of threads from the past couple months:

Felix asked about loading additional data points to a portal worklist from a value store, since he'd been told it shouldn't be done for performance reasons. Mauro outlined the reasons behind this and the impact on memory consumption.

On a similar theme, Dali was wondering what the proper replacement for UseValueStore() is. Ste explained why it's been deprecated, with Mauro highlighting the alternative way to show popups in the portal.

Back in July, Luca asked about executing scripts after a Swimlane change. Mauro told him about token behavior and suggested a workaround.

Finally, Falk was curious about whether there are any best practices when creating labels. Angry Appbird gave him some suggestions and guidance based on his experience of using labels in Appway.

You can also post ideas and give feedback to us via the Feedback & Suggestion topic in the Forum. We'd love to hear from you!

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Image courtesy Tim O'Brien / Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 6.1.4

Published August 25, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

Appway 6.1.4 is now available. It is a pure bugfix release with a focus on integration links and Internet Explorer 7 compatibility for dropdown screen components.

For more information, please see the full release notes: Release Notes 6.1.4

Patch Release: Appway 6.1.3

Published August 14, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

Appway 6.1.3 is here!

This patch release is focused on bugfixes and performance improvements, and also contains two new features.

Before upgrading to 6.1.3, make sure that scripts have been updated for Appway 6. "Read-only" process instances, introduced with Appway 6.0, are strictly implemented from 6.1.2 onwards. Any attempt to modify read-only process instances or tokens will fail. See System Upgrade 5.3.x to 6.x, "Process Instance Locking" for more information.

New features:

Inspect Process Instances Currently in Progress
The list of process instances in the console now shows information about instances currently being updated by the process engine. From Appway 6.0 to 6.1.2, the console only showed the saved state of a process instance; starting with Appway 6.1.3, system administrators can "look into" an in-progress process instance, even if it is currently updated on another cluster node.

Support for Advanced PDF Security
The PDF generation service now supports some advanced security-related PDF features. The data class "PdfRenderConfiguration" has a couple of new properties for controlling the encryption algorithm and permissions, such as whether the user is allowed to print the generated PDF. This feature was previously implemented for Appway 5.1.1, and has now been reintroduced for 6.1.3.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.1.1 to 6.1.3.
Note: Appway Release 6.1.2 should not be installed; please go directly to 6.1.3.

For more information, please see the Release notes 6.1.3 (PDF).

Advanced Training: Clusters in Appway 6

Published August 7, 2014 by Cate

System Architecture

With the introduction of Appway 6, the Appway platform can now be run as a cluster. This means Appway can be installed on multiple servers, that together form a distributed system. Almost all services in Appway 6 work in a distributed fashion, either using an inherently distributed state (e.g. distributed maps), or by keeping their state synchronized over all cluster nodes (e.g. using distributed messages or distributed tasks).

Advanced Administrator training has been extended to cover the new features and functionality introduced in Appway 6. Now taking place over two days, the course covers cluster capabilities, and goes into greater depth regarding incident management and issue handling. The course provides you with the skills necessary to install, configure, administer, deploy and maintain the Appway Platform.

The next sessions are scheduled to run in Chiasso on 16–17 September, and 20–21 October.

For more information and to register, see the training invitation.

Finding Your Way Round Appway Developer

Published August 3, 2014 by Cate

There is a wealth of content just waiting to be discovered on Appway Developer — from video tutorials guiding you through basic adaptive screen design to recipes created by members of the Appway community, there's something for everyone. Beginner or expert, designer or developer: We're here to help.

The Get Started page contains a collection of documents, articles, recipes and videos providing you with a comprehensive introduction to the basics of developing with Appway.

The Documentation tab is where you can find a vast amount of information about the different parts of the Appway platform — all of which can easily be filtered by version or topic using the menus on the left side of the pages.

Our video tutorials provide step-by-step explanations and guidance for various product features, letting you learn at your own pace. On the right of the tutorial page is a menu: From our CTO explaining the concepts behind the Appway platform, to introducing data class functions, these suggested videos provide an easily-accessible way to start your journey with Appway.

Looking for inspiration or wondering how to use a component to achieve something? Take a look at the recipes in the Developer Cookbook. Written in a problem-solution style, recipes cover everything from working with buttons, to naming conventions, to data initialization. You can also filter by topic, using the clickable menu on the left of the Cookbook homepage.

If you're unsure of how something works, want to know the suggested best practice for achieving a task or have any Appway-related question whatsoever, post it in our Forum. We're here to help!

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Image courtesy Grant Hutchinson / Flickr

Patch Release: Appway 6.1.2

Published July 30, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

UPDATE: Due to a critical issue discovered with this release, customers are advised to go straight to Appway Release 6.1.3.
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Appway 6.1.2 contains 41 bugfixes, 17 changes and 10 new features.

This release focuses on performance improvements: Most changes and bugfixes solve performance bottlenecks, mainly for installations with a large set of process instances. Similarly, many of the new features relate to detecting potential future bottlenecks.

Before upgrading to 6.1.2, make sure that scripts have been updated for Appway 6. "Read-only" process instances, introduced with Appway 6.0, are strictly implemented from 6.1.2 onwards. Any attempt to modify read-only process instances or tokens will fail. See System Upgrade 5.3.x to 6.x, "Process Instance Locking" for more information.

Highlights are listed below. For a comprehensive list of new and updated features, see the full release notes (PDF).

CPU Statistics
Appway can collect advanced CPU statistics per Java thread, servlet, scheduled job and distributed task. The results can be viewed in the Studio under "Administration > CPU Statistics". To enable this feature, set the configuration property "nm.cpustatistics.enabled" to "true".

Script Language Performance
The performance of the built-in script language has been improved by up to a factor of two, mainly due to a new fast look-up cache for frequently accessed Business Objects.

JMX Monitoring
Some additional JMX MBeans and MBean attributes have been implemented for this release. Information about all in-memory caches, statistics around process instance locks, and counters for the internal Hazelcast operation service are now exposed through JMX.

Batch Actions on Process Instances in Console
The batch actions on all visible process instances (selected by the current filter configuration) have been reintroduced.

Announcement: New technical requirements for future Appway releases

Published July 21, 2014 by Nina Schneider

System Upgrade

System Maintenance

Customer success is important to Appway: We want to give our users the best experience, and focus on the areas that will add the most value for you. As we look to the future, we have decided to update our technical requirements in order to be able to take advantage of new technology, in line with industry standards. This move forward will also improve the security and performance of Appway.

We are therefore announcing today that Appway 7, scheduled for release in 2015, will require the following:

Browser (Studio): Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), or the latest stable version of Firefox, Chrome or Safari
Browser (Workspace): Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), or the latest stable version of Firefox, Chrome or Safari
Java JDK 1.7
Servlet API 3.0

We are giving you advance notice to ensure you have as much time as possible to plan for this change.

Please note that existing Appway solutions are not affected by this decision. We will continue to support earlier releases of Appway.

More details on each of these changes can be found below.

Browser Support

What is changing?
Microsoft announced that they will completely end support for IE8 in January 2015. Appway will also stop supporting this browser in the Studio with the release of Appway 7, scheduled for 2015.

While IE8 can still be used in the Appway 7 Workspace, some new features and functionality in the Workspace will only work in IE9 or greater.

Note: As of Appway 7, IE7 will not be supported in the Workspace. As of Appway 8 (planned for 2016), IE8 will no longer be supported in the Workspace.

Why are we ending support?
Security and innovation are important to us at Appway. The security vulnerabilities discovered in IE8, and the lack of support for HTML5 are two of the main reasons for our decision. HTML5 is the new industry standard: Moving beyond IE8 will allow us to utilize modern browser technology for the benefit of you, our users.

What action do I need to take?
We strongly recommend that you upgrade to one of our supported browsers prior to the 2015 release:

Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 9 & 10
Mozilla Firefox, most recent stable version
Google Chrome, most recent stable version
Safari, most recent stable version

Java JDK and Servlet API

What is changing?
As of Appway 7, application servers will be required to run Java JDK 1.7, and Servlet Specification 3.0 or above.

Why are we ending support?
Two key factors stood out for us when deciding to update our technical requirements: security and advances in technology.

Oracle announced the end of support for Java JDK 1.6 in February 2013. Moving to 1.7 means we are using a maintained JDK, a more secure foundation for us to build upon.

Moving to Java JDK 1.7 also allows us to take advantage of web service features and improved APIs for Appway 7.

Upgrading to Specification 3.0 will improve platform performance and Screen responsiveness through use of the WebSocket protocol.

What action do I need to take?
We strongly recommend that you upgrade to an application server supporting Servlet Specification 3.0 prior to the 2015 release:

WebSphere 8
WebLogic 12
Tomcat 7
JBoss 6

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Where can I get more information?
The Appway Developer Forum is always available for you to post any questions you may have about these changes. If you need further information, please contact your Appway account manager.

We look forward to working with you during this transition.

Portal Worklist — Tips and Tricks

Published July 14, 2014 by Cate

Extensions

Screen Layout

When users open their Workspace, they expect it to be functional, useful, and easy to navigate. Users often want to know the status of processes they are involved in, and especially about those processes that require action on their part.

The Portal Worklist extension helps you create a Workspace that does just this. Providing you with configurable columns with filtering, sorting and caching capabilities, the extension helps you create worklists tailored to your users' needs. The extension also includes a CSS resource file, so you can easily adapt styles and icons to your requirements.

This tutorial covers the basics of how the Portal Worklist works, while the documentation covers the extension in detail.

Here are four ideas to help you get the most out of your portal worklists:

View details pop-up
One feature you may like to provide for your users is a pop-up window containing additional information about each process. This can be done by adding a new "view details" task within the process itself, eliminating the need to use the "UseValueStore" function. More details can be found in the Portal Screen: Display "view details" pop-up for each task recipe.

SLA status
End users of Appway applications often want to check the status of the tasks assigned to them, so they know if any activity is expired or close to expiration according to the SLAs.

If the BAM and Portal Worklist (v2.2.8 or higher) extensions are installed on your system, "ProcessSLA" and "Activity SLA" columns can be included in a Worklist. Using a convenient red-yellow-green color system, users can see the SLA status of their tasks and act accordingly.

Sorting worklist columns
When creating worklists for your users, you may like to provide them the option of sorting their worklists according to their personal preference — by date, reverse alphabetically, according to SLA status, and so on. Find out how implement such functionality in How to Sort a Portal Worklist.

Migrating to 4.x
Are you using Appway 6.0 or greater? Then you can migrate to version 4.x of the Portal Worklist extension. The "Workitem Set" tab is configured differently in version 4.0 compared to versions 2.2.x and lower, so you are strongly advised to read the Portal Worklist migration recipe before starting an upgrade.

Have you found a great way to display things using the Portal Worklist? Why not contribute a recipe to the Appway Developer cookbook and share your knowledge with the Appway community! Simply sign in or register to get started.

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Image courtesy Gwenael Piaser/Flickr

Develop your skills with Appway Academy

Published July 7, 2014 by n/A

Studio

Workspace

BAM

Whether you're a relative newcomer or a seasoned Appway developer, training sessions offered by the Appway Academy will help you sharpen your skills and improve your knowledge of the Appway platform. The dates of our full September program are listed below - from introductory to advanced sessions, there's something for everyone.

Trainings are held at our new facility in Chiasso, away from the distractions of daily life. When the sessions are over, our knowledgable onsite staff are available for questions — and can point you in the direction of some nice Italian restaurants!

Fundamental (Sept 2–3)
Learn the basics of Appway in this two-day course. An Appway trainer will teach you how to build a business process from scratch in this hands-on training.
>>More information and registration

Advanced for Business Analysts (Sept 4–5)
This follow-up course guides you through the requirement-gathering process for an Appway project, how to create mockups, and also covers advanced modeling techniques and Appway's collaborative features.
>>More information and registration

Advanced for Developers (Sept 8–11)
This four-day training includes practical exercises with advanced functionalities and advice on best practices when developing applications.
>>More information and registration

Advanced for Administrators (Sept 16–17)
This follow-up course covers the skills necessary to install, configure, administer, deploy and maintain the Appway Platform. It now also covers clusters (for Appway 6).
>>More information and registration

Business Activity Monitoring (Sept 18)
Appway Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is an out-of-the-box analytics solution that gives organizations real-time information to make swift, data-driven decisions and foster a more responsive business.
This one-day course covers BAM usage and configuration, installation and customization.
>>More information and registration

For more information about all our courses, visit appway.com/academy

Official release: Appway 6.1.1

Published June 30, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

We're pleased to announce the release of Appway 6.1.1. With just over 20 new features, and 22 changes compared to Appway 6.0.2, this release improves performance, and contains various small bug fixes.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.0.2 to 6.1.1.

Some of the highlights are listed below. For a comprehensive list of new and updated features, see the full release notes (PDF).

Cluster Performance
Write command queue
A write command queue has been added for value stores and for process instances. This avoids unnecessary write operations if they fall within a configurable time interval.

Value stores
Value store eviction (value store loading on-demand) can also now be enabled. You can choose between setting a cap on the size of the value stores map, or setting a maximum idle time for value stores.

Cluster Locks
The default write lock pool size has been increased from 64 to 256. This will reduce the number of lock collisions in larger installations.

Security & Encryption
File Path Encryption
Appway now uses AES with 256-bit keys to encrypt file paths. File paths encrypted with DES in Appway 5.x or 6.0 can still be decrypted in Appway 6.1.

Check that the configuration property "nm.pathencryption.password" is defined and has a non-empty value when upgrading to Appway 6.1, otherwise encryption and decryption of file system paths will fail.

Integration of OWASP Enterprise Security API (ESAPI) library 2.1.0
Appway uses the ESAPI library to protect against cross-site scripting, HTTP response splitting and CRLF injection attacks. The ESAPI library is configured and initialized on Appway startup, unless the configuration property "nm.security.esapi.init" is set to "false".

Studio and Process Editor
Administration Tab
In the Administration Tab, "Email", "Job Scheduler" and "Licensing: History" have an improved user interface which no longer uses pageing.

Modal Window
If a modal window appears in the Studio, focus now stays on the first field of the window, allowing you to immediately type into the field.

Process Editor
The "Task List Name" property for activities (tasks and sub-processes) is now dynamic. Users' worklists can, for example, be configured to display customer names next to the relevant task.

Together with the release of Appway 6.1.1, new versions of the following extensions are available:

CassandraHazelcastStore
Component Extension
DataStore
WebServices

Patch Release: Appway 6.0.2

Published June 10, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

Appway's 6.0.2 release is now available. It contains a patch for the deployment of previously deleted Business Objects and 14 other small bug fixes.

Release Notes 6.0.2 (PDF)

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) 2.0 / 3.0 – Release highlights

Published May 26, 2014 by Laura Monetti

BAM

Extensions

We’re happy to announce the launch of the latest version of the Appway BAM product. This release includes an Appway 5.3.10(+) compatible version (Appway BAM 2.0) as well as an Appway 6.0 compatible version (Appway BAM 3.0). Appway BAM versions 2.0 and 3.0 both contain a very similar set of new features, the difference being an improved dashboards UI for BAM 3.0.

Selected highlights from the latest Appway BAM extension release are listed below. For more in-depth information on the product as a whole, check out the product documentation. For a comprehensive list of new and updated features, see the full release notes (PDF).

New features in BAM 2.0/3.0:

Measure, Analyze & Monitor use case: A new use case for the BAM product which allows users to start tracking and storing process information in the BAM DB without being required to first set SLAs. This new use case solves the issue of SLA values not being available when BAM is installed for the first time.
Support for activity (token) level Key Performance Indicators: It is now possible to define and measure KPIs set at activity (token) level. This allows users to track values related to different sub-processes separately. Activity KPIs can also be used for filtering and reporting purposes in the BAM Dashboards.
New statistical charts in the BAM Dashboards: Two new charts have been added: a duration distribution bar chart and a duration scatter plot. The duration distribution bar chart displays the distribution of instance duration around the average duration, while the duration scatter plot can be used to find correlations between process duration and the value of a KPI.
Visual update of the BAM Dashboards: Dashboard styling has been improved from a design and usability perspective. The new dashboards also use Appway responsive screen components that adapt easily to smaller screens.
Support for additional database management systems: In addition to Oracle DBMS, BAM now also supports MySQL and SQLServer DBMS as storage technologies.

Appway patch release 5.3.11

Published May 7, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

The Appway 5.3.11 patch release is available. It contains improvements to Studio usability, changes to the "Data Table" and "Dropdown List" screen components, and 32 bug fixes. This release patches a security vulnerability in the embedded Java library "Apache Commons FileUpload".

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 5.3.10 to 5.3.11.

Release Notes 5.3.11 (PDF)

Together with release 5.3.11, new versions of the following extensions are available:

ComponentExtension 2.0.88
DataStore 2.16
FunctionsExtension 2.0.31
POI 2.1.10
SMSAdapter 2.0.3.1
RESTExtension 2.12
SOAPExtension 2.2.25
WebServices 1.12

Appway patch release 6.0.1

Published May 6, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

The first patch release for Appway 6 is ready. It contains 24 bug fixes and 3 changes, two of which are security-related.

A vulnerability in the embedded Java library "Apache Commons File Upload" has been fixed. This patch also introduces Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection for the Workspace.

No special actions are required when upgrading from Appway 6.0 to 6.0.1.

Release Notes 6.0.1 (PDF)

Appway 6 - Release highlights

Published April 29, 2014 by Emilie Boillat

We're thrilled to announce the release of Appway 6. This post is an overview of the most important high-level changes since Appway 5.3. The main novelties include Studio dashboards, multi-node architecture support, improved mobile responsiveness for Screens, and enhanced web service integration and security.

For a full list of changes, see Release Notes 6.0 (PDF). For upgrade instructions, see System Upgrade 5.3.x to 6.x.

Studio and Workspace

Developer Dashboard (new)
The previous Studio home screen has been replaced by a new Developer Dashboard. It provides insight into the Appway installation, developers working on that installation, Business Objects, and other data.

System Dashboard and Node Inspectors (new)
A new System Dashboard gives live updates on the health of the Appway system. The Node Inspectors allow developers to monitor individual cluster nodes.

Exporting deleted Business Objects (new)
It is now possible to deploy deleted Business Objects between different Appway installations. This allows developers to propagate deletions between different systems.

Workspace styles (changed)
The Workspace has received a new visual style. To ensure backwards-compatibility, the former default stylesheet is automatically set when upgrading an existing installation to Appway 6. To change to the new stylesheet, set the property "nm.workspace.css.version" to the value "v2".

Test Data editor (changed)
The Test Data editor has been overhauled. It is now faster and offers better support for large and complex sets of data.

Portal Worklist extension (changed)
The Portal Worklist extension has been overhauled and is now faster, easier to maintain and more reliable. >> Read more

Cluster Capability

Multi-node architecture support (new)
Appway 6 automatically distributes its state and computation over all available cluster nodes. Appway thus ensures scalability in the number of process instances and high availability.

Pluggable cluster storage (new)
Most of the data which was previously located in the Appway data home has been moved to cluster storage. Cluster storage can be configured to use either a distributed file system, a relational database or Cassandra.

Runtime elasticity (new)
Cluster nodes can be added or removed at runtime.

Cluster File service (new)
Cluster files are available on all nodes and reside in a virtual directory hierarchy. Note that solution-specific local files do not work in a multi-node installation. Migration options include a distributed file system for solution-specific files, or updating the solution to work with cluster files.

ClusterFile and LocalFile Primitive Types (new)
The new "ClusterFile" Primitive Type represents a file available on all nodes of a clustered installation while "LocalFile" represents a regular file on local storage. Both Primitive Types offer common file operations like read, write, move, copy, etc.

Cluster Cache service (new)
The Cluster Cache service provides a distributed key-value store cache. In comparison to the local Application Cache, it requires only one source access per cluster instead of one per node.

Cluster Log service (new)
The Cluster Log service transparently collects log statements from all nodes and makes them available in the Studio.

Cluster Lock services (new)
The Cluster Lock and Cluster Read-Write Lock services can be used to lock resources on all nodes in the cluster.

Job Execution service (new)
The Job Execution service makes it possible to execute a job on one node only.

Data-Home-to-Cluster converter (new)
This tool converts an Appway 5.3 data home, and splits it into an Appway 6 data home and a cluster storage directory (based on a file system).

Screens

Adaptive Flow Layout (new)
The new Adaptive Flow Layout component organizes screen elements into a form layout. It ensures mobile-responsive Screens by adapting the elements' position according to the client device's type and display size.
>> Read more

Float Layout (new)
The new Float Layout component displays screen elements next to each other. It orders them horizontally and vertically according to their priority and the space available.
>> Read more

Flow Layout (deprecated)
The Flow Layout component is deprecated in Appway 6. The Adaptive Flow Layout or Float Layout components (see above) must be used instead for new Screens. No changes are required to upgrade existing solutions.

Block User action (new)
A new "Block User" action is available for screen components. It blocks users from interacting with specific screen controls during an Ajax update, or with a whole Screen while it is submitted to the server.
>> Read more

Info Table (new)
The new Info Table component replaces the Table component. It receives a layout by default, and no longer needs to be styled manually using CSS. It is also mobile, responsive, and works well on devices with small screens.
>> Read more

Slider (new)
The new Slider component allows users to select a value by sliding a cursor vertically or horizontally.

Text Field (changed)
HTML5 input type properties have been added to the Text Field component.

Border Layout Manager (changed)
New overlay properties specify the flaps' behavior in detail. Dynamic expressions have been added for most of the properties. The flap size is now configurable. >> Read more

Phase Chevron (changed)
It is now possible to display parent or current phases, and to define different colors for past steps.

Error handling for Ajax updates (changed)
The default error messages generated by Appway in case of an Ajax update error have been improved. Additional client-side error handling can be implemented by entering custom JavaScript code for the "JavaScript On Error Code" property on Ajax Update Area Actions.

Web Note (removed)
The Web Note component was removed. It was already deprecated in Appway 5.3.

Processes

Evaluate Rule task (new)
A new "Evaluate Rule" task makes it possible to evaluate a single Rule business object during a process, instead of a whole Rule Set.

Process instance locking (changed)
The locking behavior was changed in order to support multi-node installations. Process instances are now locked when they are first accessed by a request (or any other thread) and the lock is released when the request is completed. >> Read more

Process instance isolation (new)
While one thread makes changes on a process instance, these are invisible to other threads until committed. This guarantees strong consistency.

Process Data service (changed)
The Process Data service is no longer responsible for persisting process instances and value stores. The persistence commands, command queue, persistence threads and the scheduled job "Process Data Persistence" have been removed. The persistence and in-memory management of process instances and value stores is now handled by Hazelcast.

Process Messages service (changed)
Persistence and in-memory management of process messages are now handled by Hazelcast. The "Process Messages Store" cache has been removed.

Process Log service (removed)
The Process Log and Process Audit Log services have been removed. It is recommended to migrate to the Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) or Process Audit Trail extensions. Alternatively, customer-specific requirements can be implemented based on the Process Listener API.

Integration

REST service (new)
A simple interface implementation of a REST service has been introduced. The REST endpoint "/version" returns the current Appway version, while "/cluster/shutdown" initiates a cluster shutdown.

Translation service (changed)
The new Translator API can be used to implement custom translation services for Appway solutions.

HTTP client (changed)
The HTTP client is now pluggable: HttpGet, HttpPost, REST and SOAP all use the Apache HttpComponents libraries instead of the Apache Commons HTTP client libraries.

SOAP and REST extensions (changed)
The SOAP and the REST extensions have been combined into a single WebService extension. The WebService extension is a drop-in replacement for the SOAP and REST extensions.

Mutual authentication (changed)
The functionality of the Mutual Authentication extension is now part of the Appway Platform's core and thus does not exist as extension anymore. Moreover, SSL client authentication is now clustered.

POI extension (changed)
The POI extension had been updated to uses cluster files.
>> Read more

System administration

Third-party libraries (changed)
Several third-party libraries have been upgraded:

Apache Commons Libraries
Xerces-J: from 2.9.1 to 2.11.0
Quartz: from 2.1.1 to 2.2.0
Java Mail API: from 1.4.3 to 1.5.0
JFreeChart: from 1.0.10 to 1.0.15
JDOM: from 1.0 to 1.1.3
jabsorb: from 1.3.1 to 1.3.2
OpenCSV: from 2.2 to 2.3
SLF4J: from 1.6.1 to 1.7.5
PJL Compressing Filter: from 1.7 to 1.8
YUI Compressor: from 2.4.6 to 2.4.8
Camel Framework: from 2.8.1 to 2.12.2
Spring Framework: from 3.0.5 to 3.2.4
jQuery: from 1.7.1 to 1.9.1
MarkdownJ: from 1.0.2b4 to 0.5

Servlet API (changed)
The minimum Java Servlet API version required is now 2.5.

Extensions directory (changed)
The "adapters" data home subdirectory was renamed to "extensions".

Runtime Data service (removed)
The Runtime Data service has been removed. It cannot be used safely in a cluster setting since shared in-memory data entities cannot be shared across cluster nodes. Solutions using the runtime database must be migrated to the Data Store.

HSQL database (removed)
HSQL database resources are no longer delivered as part of the Appway Platform's core libraries.

Services Dictionary (removed)
The Services Dictionary was deprecated since release 5.3 and has been removed.

Backup service (removed)
Appway 5.3 back-ups focused on the data home, which no longer contains solution data. Therefore, the Backup service was obsolete and has been removed.

Heartbleed Bug in OpenSSL library

Published April 10, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

A serious vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library was revealed this week. Neither the Appway Platform nor its forerunner Nm'4 are directly affected by the so-called Heartbleed Bug.

However, as any other Java web application, Appway is deployed in a Java application server or servlet container like IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, JBoss or Apache Tomcat.

These application servers may rely on native third-party libraries like OpenSSL to implement SSL-related features. For example, Apache Tomcat can be optionally configured to use OpenSSL for better HTTPS scalability and performance.

We strongly recommend that Appway server administrators check if their application server installation is vulnerable or not. You will find more information under heartbleed.com.

The developer.appway.com website was not affected by the Heartbleed Bug and your account details are safe, including your password.

Appway patch releases 5.3.9 and 5.3.10

Published February 28, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

Appway 5.3.9 and 5.3.10 are now available. Next to bug fixes, the wizard to import Business Objects has been improved and displays a list of unsatisfied dependencies.

The new screen action "Block User" allows you to block user interaction with a screen while another action is being executed. You can read more about this new action here: "Blocking User Interaction."

The Data Table screen component has also been enhanced: it offers more customization options and the table's size is defined automatically if not set. As for the DatePicker screen component (ComponentExtension), its "Format" property is now dynamic and can be set via a script.

Release Notes 5.3.9 (PDF)
Release Notes 5.3.10 (PDF)

New versions of the following extensions are also available:

DataStore 2.13
ComponentExtension 2.0.86.3 (core)
Functions 2.0.33 (Core)

First participants inaugurate Ticino Training Center

Published February 21, 2014 by n/A

To meet the fast-growing demand for trained Appway Developers, we’ve opened a dedicated Training Center at our Ticino offices. John recently joined Appway as a System Architect and has taken part in this week's Advanced Developer training. "Appway has created a training environment that is incredibly conducive to learning," he says.

The Center offers a highly focused training experience with expert trainers in world-class facilities. The course programs are designed so participants can network with some of our best technical staff and become part of the Appway family.

"The Appway staff here has shown me a level of hospitality I have not experienced elsewhere," says John. "A great trainer who provides real-world use cases, individual attention during the exercises, a spacious room, excellent wireless connectivity... It makes it very easy to sit down with your laptop and get right to work!"

John's conclusion after a week of intensive training? "It has provided me with the knowledge and tools essential to harness the power of the Appway platform. Without the examples of BPM scenarios and best practices covered, I would never have been able to fully leverage the intuitive features that Appway provides."

The whole Academy team wishes John a very warm welcome and a successful start!

>> Read more about the new Training Center

>> View upcoming public training sessions (PDF)

Get certified now as an Appway Practitioner

Published February 17, 2014 by n/A

Discover our certification scheme to acknowledge your proficiency level with Appway. You have completed the Fundamental Training and already gathered a few months of experience with Appway? Try the first-level exam to obtain a "Practitioner" certification.

View an example of exam questions.
See pricing and pre-requisites.

Interested? Email us at academy@appway.com.

Appway patch release 5.3.8

Published February 6, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

Appway 5.3.8 is now available. It contains important bug fixes for the Dropdown List screen component, solves a compatibility issue with IBM WebSphere 8 and six other minor bugs.

Searching for components in Business Object editors has also been improved. The results are now displayed in a single list so you don't have to switch between tabs to view all components that match your search term.

Release Notes 5.3.8 (PDF)

At the same time, a new version of the ComponentExtension is available (2.0.86.2) to fix an issue on the Ajax Throbber screen component.

Tutorials for new Appway users

Published January 30, 2014 by n/A

Appway Academy is producing a series of introductory tutorials to help new users get to know the Appway Platform. Learn about basic Appway concepts, how to use the Studio and Workspace, and how to to design business objects like a Process or a Screen.

The Essence of Appway:
- Appway Bridges the Gap
- The Preserving Approach
- The Appway Model
- The Appway Architecture
- Appway Reduces Development Time

Studio Essentials:
- Structure of the Business Object Designers
- Using the Business Object Designers
- Using the Interactive Script Editor

Workspace Essentials:
- Developer Toolbar
- Task Management

Business Objects Essentials:
- Design a Process
- Design a Screen

More tutorials in this series are coming soon. We've also launched a new collection of introductory resources to help you discover the main features of the Appway Platform.
>> Get Started

Appway patch release 5.3.7

Published January 24, 2014 by Stephan Markwalder

Release 5.3.7 of the Appway Platform is now available. It mainly contains minor bug fixes and improvements. Among other modifications, a new configuration property allows you to control whether an exception should be thrown if the wrong number of arguments is passed to a Data Class function.

Several issues regarding the Data Table and Border Layout Manager screen components are also addressed in this patch.

Finally, we've improved the Studio's usability. For example, the Script Editor disables your browser's spell-checker while typing code (Firefox/Chrome). As-you-type suggestions now load much faster when editing variables or writing messages in the Discussion tool.

More details in the full release notes:
>> Release Notes 5.3.7 (PDF)

Together with release 5.3.7, new versions of the following extensions are available:

ComponentExtension 2.0.86.2
DataStore 2.11
LdapSyncAdapter 1.0.20
MailExtension 1.2.20
OfflineWorklistClient 2.5.15
POI 2.1.8
ScriptExecutionJobExtension 1.5.3
SOAPExtension 2.2.9
RESTExtension 2.3
Indexing 2.0.5

New screen components for table design

Published January 10, 2014 by Emilie Boillat

Rich Screen Controls

Screen Layout

Adaptive Design

Tables are key to structure information on screens, organize layouts or present data. We've developed several new rich screen components tailored for each type of table. They save you development effort and make your table designs adapt to any device or screen size by default.

One of these new components is the Data Table, which lets you present large sets of data dynamically. Available from Appway 5.3 onwards, it can handle large amounts of data from a variety of sources.

Adaptive design and user interaction
The size of the Data Table and its columns changes according to the device it's rendered in. Users can modify the width of columns themselves or expand a row to view more detailed information. Actions like editing or deleting can also be defined on specific table content.

Filtering and sorting
To deal with large amounts of data, the Data Table component provides default filters and sorters. They can be customized to best fit the type of data in each column.

Learn more about what you can do with the Data Table component:
>> Introductory video tutorial
>> Tutorial on the filtering and sorting functionality
>> Data Table documentation

Table design with Appway 6
Tables are not only used to display dynamic sets of data, but also to show small, static pieces of information in a tabular way. They are sometimes also used for organizing web layouts.

Appway 6 will come with a full set of components to cater for these different use cases. They replace the plain Table and Flow Layout components, which will be deprecated from version 6.0 onwards.

A new Info Table component will be launched with Appway 6 to display small, static sets of data. This component works similarly to the old Table component, but is responsive and automatically receives a visual layout.

Adaptive Layout Managers
Web design best practices discourage the use of tables for structuring layouts. To allow you to design complex adaptive and interactive layouts, we've developed components like the Border Layout Manager, the Dynamic Grid Layout and the Adaptive Flow Layout.

The Border Layout Manager component allows you to manage a screen's layout by regions. On smaller screens, the side regions can collapse into flaps to leave more space for the central content. The Dynamic Grid Layout allows you to arrange screen elements independently from each other based on the size of the browser window.

Both components are already available from release 5.3:
>> Border Layout Manager (tutorial)
>> Border Layout Manager (documentation)
>> Dynamic Grid Layout (documentation)

Finally, a new Adaptive Flow Layout will replace the current Flow Layout from version 6.0 onwards. This component is best suited to display forms containing controls such as input fields, drop-down menus, etc.

Read more about new Appway 6 screen components:
>> Changes to the Table Component in Appway 6
>> Working with Appway 6's new Adaptive Flow Layout

Appway patch release 5.3.6

Published December 9, 2013 by Stephan Markwalder

Appway patch release 5.3.6 is now available. It contains one change, 2 new features and 10 fixes for issues related to locks on business objects, validation and new screen components introduced with version 5.3.

At the same time, new versions of the following extensions are available:

CloudStorageExtension 2.0
ComponentExtension 2.0.86
ExtendedActivityReport 1.0.10
Functions 2.0.30
RESTExtension 2.0
SOAPExtension 2.2.7

Release Notes 5.3.6 (PDF)

New Training Center in Ticino

Published December 3, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

In January, we’ll inaugurate a dedicated training center at our new office in southern Switzerland. The fantastic Ticino team, the mild climate and our specially designed facilities will make for the best possible learning experience.

Public training sessions will take place in Chiasso instead of our Zurich headquarters from January onwards. The new location allows participants to get away from their usual work environment to focus on learning, coached by some of our best trainers.

Our last trainings in Zurich will take place in mid-December (“Advanced” sessions for developers and administrators). Courses for the start of 2014 are scheduled as follows in Chiasso:

Fundamental: 16-17 January, 13-14 February or 11-12 March. A Fast-Track Fundamental course for developers is also planned on 25 February.
Advanced for Developers: 17-20 February
Advanced for Administrators: 21 February

We also offer remote half-day workshops about Diagnosis techniques (19 December, 24 January, 26 February, 21 March).

For more information about the Appway Academy or to register for a training session, go to appway.com/academy.

Appway patch releases 5.3.4 and 5.3.5

Published November 14, 2013 by Stephan Markwalder

The patch releases 5.3.4 and 5.3.5 are now available; both mainly contain bug fixes for the Appway core. The most important bugs fixed include a JavaScript memory leak in the Studio and an issue with the "Export Custom List" feature in the Library.

Together with the newest patch releases, new versions of the following extensions are available:

BAMExtension (2.0.10-dev)
ComponentExtension (2.0.86)
DataStore (2.10)
POI (2.1.6)
ProcessMigration (0.7.2)
ChartingExtension (2.0.48)
ScreenImage (1.0.4)
PRTGExtension (1.9)
SOAPExtension (2.1.14)
DeploymentExtension (6.8.5)

Release Notes 5.3.4 (PDF)
Release Notes 5.3.5 (PDF)

Appway patch release 5.3.3

Published October 23, 2013 by Stephan Markwalder

Appway patch release 5.3.3 is now available. It contains 28 bug fixes, the most important of which relates to memory management for value stores. We have also added 5 new features and made 13 changes, mostly in the new screen components introduced with version 5.3 and in integration links.

Release notes 5.3.3 (PDF)

Appway Developer officially launched

Published September 17, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

At our conference on Sept 17-18th, we're launching Appway Developer: your first stop for knowledge about the Appway Platform. Join the community and share know-how with other professionals who model, build, manage or integrate Appway applications.

The Appway Customer Services team is happy to introduce this application, entirely developed with the Appway Platform - for developers, by developers:

Forum: Share best practices and find answers to your questions.
Cookbook: Find step-by-step recipes for your problem.
Tutorials: Learn at your own pace with video tutorials.
Documentation: Gain in-depth knowledge of Appway products.
Blog: Keep up with new features and releases.

Read more about Appway Developer

If you are at the Appway Conference, come by and meet us in the Lounge. We'd love to show you around.

Appway patch release 5.3.2

Published September 10, 2013 by Stephan Markwalder

Process Execution

A new Appway patch release with version 5.3.2 is available. It is a bugfix release with 18 bugfixes, 3 features and 7 changes. The risk of upgrading from 5.3.1 to 5.3.2 is minimal to zero.

Release notes 5.3.2 (PDF)

Appway 5.3.2 comes with an (optional) extended strategy for the assignment of participants to process tokens on tasks and sub-processes. Up to Appway 5.3.1, the assignment was made based on the participant selected on the swimlane or the return value of the swimlane expression. This is still the default strategy in Appway 5.3.2.

What is new is that, if the configuration property "nm.workflowengine.assignmentstrategy" is set to "Extended", Appway 5.3.2 will use an extended assignment strategy:

If the process token already has an assigned participant, it is not reassigned.
If the process token has a property "Appway.QueueName", the value of this property is used as participant.
If the process token has an attribute "Appway.QueueName", the value of this attribute is used as participant.
Otherwise, the default assignment strategy is used.

The extended assignment strategy allows users to "override" the default assignment rules based on swimlanes by setting a participant in an attribute or property of the process token.

The advantage of using a property is that it exists only for as long as the token is on the current process element ("override once"). If an attribute is used instead, it moves together with the token through the process ("sticky override").

New Academy offering

Published September 4, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

We've extended our training services to provide Appway users with a continuous path along which to get started, develop and perfect their skills. We now offer four types of training services: instructor-led sessions, online tutorials, expert coaching and a certification scheme.

Instructor-led: scheduled public sessions at our training center, private sessions at your office, or webinar.
Online tutorials: a library of online videos, documents and quizzes.
Expert coaching: one-to-one training sessions on a topic of your choice with one of our expert trainers.
Certifications: Get acknowledgment for your proficiency level as an Appway Practitioner, Professional or Master.

Our new training catalog has also just been released. We now offer "Advanced" trainings according to your profile (Developer, Administrator or Business Analyst).

Fundamental: how to build a business process from scratch
Advanced for Developers: in-depth command of Appway business objects, including practical exercises with advanced functionalities and advice on best practices
Advanced for Administrators: how to install, configure, administer, deploy and maintain the Appway Platform
Advanced for Business Analysts: how to model process-oriented business solutions using the Appway Studio
Diagnosis: how to read Appway, troubleshoot issues that may arise when working with the Platform, and prevent them

Find out more about our revised Academy services on www.appway.com/academy, including pricing, a calendar of scheduled public sessions up to the end of the year, and direct online registration.

"Essence of Appway" video series

Published August 27, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

Appway Concepts

Watch our CTO Oliver Brupbacher explain the key concepts behind the Appway Platform.
In a freshly published series of five videos, he introduces Appway's approach to application development and the Platform's basic architecture.

>> 1. Appway Bridges the Gap: Appway bridges the gap between IT and Business people by providing them with a common visual language.

>> 2. The Preserving Approach: Appway preserves continuity from the specification through to the production stage thanks to its single tool, language and method.

>> 3. The Appway Model: A single platform based on business objects and their interconnections enables collaborative application building, validation, testing, deployment and execution.

>> 4. The Appway Architecture: Appway’s architecture enables shorter development cycles by dissociating infrastructure and execution.

>> 5. Appway Reduces Development Time: Shorter development cycles limit risks and reduce the time it takes from kick-off to go-live.

Appway Conference – Developer Day program

Published August 12, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

Intensive, comprehensive, and highly engaging – the Appway Conference Developer Day (Sept. 18th) will advance your Appway skills from beginner to proficient or advanced to guru. After just one day, you'll return to your business a best-in-class Appway developer.

>> Detailed agenda (PDF)
>> Registration

Registration includes:

Fast-track Fundamentals Training: Comprehensive training for beginners (worth CHF1,500).
Advanced & Best Practice Sessions: New products and components and how-to advice from Appway experts.
Exclusive Appway 6 preview and Q&A with Appway CTO Oliver Brupbacher.
Bring Your Own Project: Brainstorm new ideas, troubleshoot, and get on-the-spot help from Appway’s core developers.
Appway Brand Bag filled with goodies including an Appway notebook, t-shirt, keychain and more.

The Appway core development team looks forward to meeting you in person.

Preview processes and modify IDs in 5.3

Published August 2, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

Process Design

Business Objects

Until now, you couldn't modify a Business Object's ID once you had created it. This is now possible with the 5.3 release. A new "preview" tab for processes also lets you simulate how a process would run while designing it.

ID Refactoring
It hasn't been possible to fix mistakes in Business Object IDs, since modifying these would break the object's dependencies. Release 5.3 introduces a refactoring feature which makes the necessary changes in all locations where the Business Object in question has been used or referenced.
>> Watch a video tutorial
>> Read the documentation
See also these best-practice guidelines on choosing names for elements in Appway:
>> Naming Conventions

Preview Processes
The Process Designer now allows you to run simulations of your processes, much like a board game. In the newly added "Preview" tab, you can take an interactive walk-through of all process steps. This helps to get all business stakeholders invloved at the design phase in order to gather fast feedback.
>> Watch a video tutorial

Preview of a sample process

Appway patch release 5.3.1

Published July 26, 2013 by Stephan Markwalder

Process Execution

A new version of Appway is available: 5.3.1.

This is the most recent official release of Appway. It is a patch release for 5.3 and contains the same features and bugfixes we have released on 24th July in 5.2.3.9, plus some new bugfixes unique for version 5.3.

Links:
ReleaseNotes-5.3.1.pdf

Appway patch release 5.2.3.9

Published July 24, 2013 by Stephan Markwalder

Process Execution

Appway 5.2.3.9 is now available for download.

It is a patch release with a strong focus on performance of the process console, mainly for installations with 10'000+ process instances and a data home located on a NAS (network-attached storage).

It also contains a fix for the "Variable not defined" bug in screen includes and templates.

Links:
ReleaseNotes-5.2.3.9.pdf

New dynamic screen components

Published July 22, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

Screen Layout

Rich Screen Controls

Release 5.3 introduces dynamic screen components: manage your screens’ look and feel dynamically with the Grid Layout or the Border Layout Manager. Three highly customizable, interactive screen widgets are also major novelties in this release: the Portal Worklist, Phase Chevron and Data Table components.

Grid-based layouts are built using many individual components that are arranged on the screen independently from each other. Appway rearranges them based on the size of the browser window.
>> Grid Layout documentation

Border layouts manage content by region. Each border layout has a "Center" region with a dynamic size. The other four regions can be added optionally above (North), below (South), or on the side (West / East). Their content remains in the same location relative to the Center region and can be collapsed into flaps for smaller screen sizes.
>> Watch a video tutorial
>> Border Layout Manager documentation

The Worklist component manages workitems from an application's portal page. Worklists have configurable columns including filtering, sorting and caching functionality, and an integrated participant tracker. End users can directly act on the tasks assigned to them from their worklist.
>> Watch a video tutorial
>> Portal Worklist documentation

The Phase Chevron component generate a progress bar which adapts to the screen according to the space available. It displays all the phases of the root process in which the screen is used, with the current phase highlighted.
>> Watch a video tutorial
>> Phase Chevron documentation

The Data Table component allows data sorting and filtering with minimal resource requirements. It includes action column allowing users to execute certain functions on a row. By clicking on a row, the table displays an interline revealing more detailed information.
>> Data Table documentation

UPDATE 06 JAN 2014
-------------------------------
Two video tutorials are now available for the Data Table component:
>> Screen Component - Data Table
>> Screen Component - Data Table Filters and Sorters

New Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) extension

Published July 1, 2013 by Laura Monetti

BAM

Extensions

We’ve just launched our Business Activity Monitoring solution - Appway BAM.

It’s a complete monitoring solution that comes as an extension for Appway. It provides managers with real-time visibility and control over processes in their Appway instance.

Appway BAM includes out-of-the-box dashboards with aggregation and drill-down features, advanced filtering, and a rich user interface with clickable charts.

Behind the scenes, you can easily configure Service Level Agreements to monitor the duration of processes and activities. You can also customize business KPIs for advanced filtering and reporting.

Here’s an overview Appway BAM’s main features. For in-depth information, check out the product documentation.

Appway BAM Dashboards

Out-of-the-box solution: Dashboards are provided as out-of-the-box components with Appway BAM.
Fully customizable: Built using the Appway Studio, BAM Dashboards are fully customizable with standard Appway business objects editors.
Real-time monitoring: Monitor the status of running and completed processes and activities in real time.
Aggregation: Data related to process and activity duration, together with key indicators, can be aggregated to create high-level summaries.
Drill-down: Achieve a detailed display of processes and activities; from grouped overviews down to single instances.
Clickable charts: BAM Dashboards include rich, clickable charts displaying the number of instances, the SLA status of processes and their average monthly duration.
Advanced filtering: Apply advanced filtering criteria on data and save your preferred filters.
Excel reporting: Download spreadsheet reports containing data acquired by Appway BAM at the process or activity level.
SLA tracking in portal: SLA status can be tracked by individual users in their task list inbox on the Appway portal page.

Service Level Agreement (SLA) and Scenario Management

Process and activity level: The SLA duration contracts can be specified at both process and activity level.
Scenarios: The scenario concept allows the customization of SLAs based on specific business use cases.
Visual editor: SLAs can be managed via a visual editor that is integrated in the Appway Studio.
Threshold mechanism: It is possible to define thresholds on SLAs in order to implement user warnings on tasks that are close to the due date.
Reporting: It is possible to report on SLA and scenarios via Appway PDF reporting.
Import/export: SLAs can be exported/imported between different staging environments.

Custom Business Indicators

Monitoring and filtering: Custom process attributes can be used as a base for monitoring and filtering operations.
Integrated in process editor: The definition of indicators is integrated in the process editor and represented visually as trackpoints.

>> Read on:

Extensions available with release 5.3

Published May 23, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

Integration Extensions

The following new extensions are available; they are compatible with release 5.3 onwards.

Processes

Microsoft Visio: import and convert static Visio process flows to Process Business Objects, and export Appway Processes back to Microsoft Visio.
Migration of runtime process instances:
- Migration of an active running process to a more recent version of the model
- Search for processes in specific states
- Set the state of processes or inject data into processes
- Make bulk changes within the version filter
- Accessible by scripts for more complex changes

Deployment

New Deployment extension: support for command-line deployments

Integration

New PRTG extension: PRTG network monitoring for Appway
New JMX Browser extension: displays all JMX attributes and values available
New REST extension, including JSON support
Improved SOAP extension: enhanced compatibility with XML and SOAP standards

Appway 5.3 - Release highlights

Published May 15, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

The latest Appway release is around the corner and these are the main novelties. To see it live, you can request a demo here.

Appway Studio

ID refactoring:
- Make changes to the unique identifier of any Business Object
- Refactoring preview and impact analysis
- New version after refactoring; old states keep working
Process Engine: new “paused” state for process instances
Workspace: highlight Includes in a Screen section and directly edit them
Metadata Editor: Business Object properties editable within any Business Object’s editor
Variable Definitions: new editor for all Business Object types
User interface: large lists can be optimally filtered and displayed thanks to the introduction of Data Tables

Process Editor

New Preview tab:
- Process models are entirely interactive and walkable
- Walk token through process steps with navigation buttons or directly jump to a specific step
- Impersonation: take over a specific user’s role
New Track Point component:
- Visually define custom track points within a process
- Store tracking data in in files or to any Oracle, MySQL or MSSQL database
- Access all tracking data during process execution
- Integrates with Business Activity Monitoring and Business Process Audit extensions
Start and Intermediate Message Event components: variable declaration is now explicit
Placeholder component can be converted into Screens and Sub-Processes by right-click

Screen Editor

Improved preview:
- Random Test Data: automatic test data generator for instant screen testing
- User-based screen testing: generate screen preview based on specific user assigned to the TestUsers group
New layout managers:
- Border Layout Manager for top, bottom, left, right and center screen areas
- Grid Layout Manager for individual cell areas
New widget components:
- Portal Worklist: Workitems management with configurable columns including filtering, sorting and caching functionality and an integrated participant tracker.
- Data Table : sortable and filterable table for handling large amounts of data from Catalogs or specific script functions
- Dropdown List: searchable dropdown list allowing multiple selections
- List Box: highly configurable lists allowing multiple selections
- Tab Box: add tabs to a specific screen section
- Text Editor: rich text editor with extended formatting features
- Charts: Interactive line, bar and pie charts
Improved widget components:
- Google Map widget adapted and refactored
- Image widget now includes a mouse-over magnifying glass

PDF Output documents

Highlight form fields in color, e.g. those fields a customer is required to fill out.
Improved PDF preview: better browser compatibility and no plugin required
Optimized PDF merging for minimal document size

Data Classes

New editor for Data Class Business Objects

Deployment

Import any file (e.g. images, text resources, CSV, CSS, HTML, PDF) as a Business Object: the type is determined based on the file’s extension
Revised deployment interface:
- Better handling of large amounts of Business Objects
- Enhanced Business Object filtering
- Visual history to compare local and imported Business Objects

ScriptFunctions

Date-related functions (DATEFORMAT, DATEPARSE, PARSEDATE) now support time zones

Infrastructure

Edit starting order for extensions
Extensions start up according to the order defined and shut down in the reverse order
Faster repository start-up thanks to the use of multiple processors

Appway patch release 5.2.3.5

Published April 17, 2013 by Stephan Markwalder

A new patch release 5.2.3.5 is available.

The reason for publishing a new release so shortly after release 5.2.3.4 is that we decided to revert a change introduced in the previous release. Several people have reported problems with backward-compatibility. More information can be found in the release notes.

The release also contains a small bugfix for the rendering of HTML comments and updated versions of the extensions "ActionsExtension", "PortalWorkList" and "ComponentExtension".

Links:
ReleaseNotes-5.2.3.5.pdf

Welcome to Appway Developer

Published April 9, 2013 by Emilie Boillat

Today we're giving our customers, partners and trained Appway professionals early access to this new platform. Welcome to Appway Developer!

This is your first stop for technical information - whether you model, build, implement, manage or integrate applications with Appway. We hope you’ll find the information you need and enjoy sharing experiences with fellow developers.

Appway Developer replaces our current documentation and training platforms, docs.appway.com and academy.appway.com.

If you already have a Support account, you can use it for this platform, too. No account yet? Register in the top right corner of this screen.

Over the next few months, we’ll keep up the work on new content and features. We welcome your feedback and ideas...