New to Servoy
If you are new to Servoy, there are two things you should be aware of. First, Servoy has both development and deployment components. Second, Servoy is not a database.
Depending on your previous experience, either one or both of these facts may be different than what you are used to.
Resources
We have a number of useful coding related videos posted here:
Important Servoy links:.
RAD tool and deployment platform
From the Servoy Quickstart Guide:
Servoy is unique in that it is both a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool and a production deployment platform.
This matters because installation is different for developer and deployment machines. The Servoy developer component is based on Eclipse and is a stand-alone IDE with an integrated server for debugging. The Servoy server component is typically installed as a headless process and comes with a browser-based administration interface.
Running Servoy Developer and Servoy Server on the same machine at the same time is only possible if you change the port number for one of the instances (default is 8080). Generally, it is not recommended to have both on the same machine just because that would be really weird for a whole bunch of IT deployment and development workflow related reasons.
One of which would be that at no time do you develop on a “live” application. Instead, you write code in Servoy Developer, export your solution to a file, and then import this file into Servoy Server via the administration interface.
If you catch an error after importing to the live production environment, Servoy Server has a really cool feature that allows you to rollback the deployed application to any previously uploaded version of the application.
Installing Servoy Server can be a bit involved and is beyond the scope of this document. When you download and install Servoy for the first time, it will most likely be for the reason of setting up the Servoy developer component. And this process is about as easy as an installation can be so no need to elaborate further here. Except to note that…
Servoy is not a database
Whoa…what?!? Again, from the quickstart guide:
Servoy is NOT a database. There are plenty great databases out there and Servoy can connect any modern RDBMS (and even some that aren’t so modern).
The confusion here is twofold:
- Servoy ships with PostgreSQL
- Most Servoy applications you develop use a database
Having PostgreSQL bundled into your developer install is really convenient for your first foray into Servoy development as it is just one less thing you have to think about. A drawback to this setup is that the PostgreSQL database engine starts up and shuts down as you open and close Servoy Developer. It also runs on the default PostgreSQL ports so if you already have PostgreSQL running, the Servoy install of PostgreSQL won’t start up at all.
The key to all this is to recognize that Servoy allows you to connect to any database you want. We basically never install the default database nowadays when installing Servoy but instead [connect to RDBMS’s] already installed on our machines (developer and server) after we have installed Servoy. This allows us to manage the database layer in one place no matter how many various development environments and client projects we’re juggling at any given time.
We primarily test against MySQL and occasionally PostgreSQL No recommendation implied here—just the way we roll. In Sutra CMS we have avoided using non-standard SQL queries and unique database features so feel free to use with the RDMS of your choice. Please let us know if you come across any database related issues.