We are proud to announce the CTP (Community Technology Preview) version of the upcoming 3.3 release of the Novulo Architect and Novulo Application server. A total of 103 roadmap items and bug fixes have been implemented. This page highlights the most important new features.
A major change in Novulo 3.3 is the support for dummy fields and the related page state. These two features combined provide a powerful mechanism to make applications more efficient and easier to use. Dummy fields can be used to let the user enter data that is used to control things such as dropdown and grid filters and visibility of elements. Controlling page states allows a broad range of functionality that is otherwise difficult to implement.
Tabbed panels can be used to place page content behind different tabs in one panel. This powerful feature allows your application to arrange its page content clearly and compactly.
A form region is a dynamic part of a form that may contain a set of fields that belong to a certain type. The fields that are actually shown are based on a list of records of this type, i.e. the fields are repeated for each record. The complete set of records can then be viewed, edited or added on the same page.
Functions, as is well known, can be used to encapsulate calculations that belong to a certain type of record. However, calculating values of complex functions may be a time consuming task. Using these functions in, for example, a grid, often results in poor performance.
This problem is solved in 3.3 by introducing cached functions. When the 'cached' property of a function is enabled, the generated system will store its value, so that they don't need to be calculated each time they are used. A stored value is automatically updated whenever something changes on which it depends.
With this new feature, using complex functions will not result in poor performance anymore.
The Novulo Architect 3.3 includes a new and improved system for deriving data models. One of its features is a new UML view. The UML view shows your system's data model in an easy to understand way. In addition, the UML view lets you edit properties of the data model, such as type and field names.