A little look at Plex-XML

Many of you may have had read about the Plex-XML framework from Allabout Gmbh.  There have been mentions online (LinkedIn - Plex group or PlexWiki for example).  The guys were at the conference in 2007 and this caused quite a stir in the Plex community.  Well the technology is still going strong.

I decided that I’d take a look.  This is the great thing about having a role which is focused on R&D and application architecture, you get to play with things, this is of course allowed by my employer www.sasit.co.nz who specialise in mission critical systems hosting and development (Harmless plug) so take a  look at the web page.  The pressure comes when you need to back up your decisions, so interesting times.....

My investigation was a case of downloading the relevant stuff from the guys as well as Eclipse (IDE), MySQL (Database), Java JRE (Runtime), Senchas ExtJS (Javascript control library), Tomcat (Web Server) and some drivers etc.  A full list of requirements and how to put this all together is on the Plex-XML website (Wiki).

So after some great support from the guys at Allabout I did end up with a fully working tutorial application.  

A screenshot from the tutorial.

But that’s cheating though isn’t it.  All the hard work was done for me.  I needed to know what all the heaving lifting requirements are in order to evaluate further.  So I then decided to replicate this for one of my own entities from ‘Plex entity entry’ right through to all the configuration files and framework parameters. 

I chose a very basic entity with a numeric key, short description, date, long description (notes) and a status and “NO!!!!”, I am not going to describe every step here as:-

1.       It’s not the scope of this blog post.

2.       It’s already described in the Plex-XML wiki

So I followed the instructions once more and I made quite a few small mistakes with my naming conventions etc so be careful when doing these.  But, I did manage to get it all working once I knew what to change and create.

My new entity :-)

What I liked was the out of the box stuff.  I never coded the date picker or the x of xxx characters remaining stuff.  It just happened!!! J

As I have already alluded to, the pain for me was the configuration files etc and I am chuffed to bits to hear of another company from Germany who have been promoting their utility to help them with the Plex-XML framework.  Te@mconsult.  Check out this link. These two combined make all the difference and I for one can’t wait until the public beta commences.

So ‘all in all’ this was a great experience.  I strongly recommend that everyone takes a look at many of the 3^rd party patterns that are available for CA Plex.  Sure it’s great to be a developer and cut your own, but some of these frameworks and patterns from some of the major players have been on the go for a few years now and that effort vs price (if applicable) really is a “no brainer”.

Thanks for reading.

Lee.