Currently running 4.2.1

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stuart hellard

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Jun 9, 2021, 2:47:12 AM6/9/21
to manydesigns-portofino
I am currently running 4.2.1 and its always run very well indeed and suits the business need / model.

What advantages does 5.2.1 have for instance can i have more groups?
Does it have any reporting facilities?

What is the minimum virtual server platform i would need to run it to see if its worth changing it all over to 5.2.1?

What other advantages does it have

thank you very much

Stuart Hellard

Alessio Stalla

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Jun 10, 2021, 6:13:07 AM6/10/21
to manydesign...@googlegroups.com
On Wed, 9 Jun 2021 at 08:47, stuart hellard <budgetbl...@gmail.com> wrote:
I am currently running 4.2.1 and its always run very well indeed and suits the business need / model.

Nice to hear! If you can comment on your use of Portofino, or want to fill the survey (https://forms.gle/5yv6vLtb3LjLpeMe7) if you haven't done already, that information can be precious to understand how people are using it and to orient further development.
 
What advantages does 5.2.1 have for instance can i have more groups?

If you're referring to user groups, nothing has changed in version 5, but you can have as many groups as you want in v4 as well. The built-in ones are just special since they don't depend on the user.

In general, version 5 mostly has a technology advantage over v4, in that it has updated its architecture from MVC to REST and dropped unmaintained libraries such as Stripes and Hibernate 4, in favor of more modern and actively developed libraries such as Angular and Hibernate 5. We've added the Spring framework to wire services up instead of using the simplistic in-house solution we had in v4. In general, our aim is for Portofino 5 to be more modern, more developer-friendly, and better suited to a microservices architecture.
However, from a user's point of view, it's mostly a matter of aesthetic preference. Not everybody likes the Google Material UI that comes with Angular. On the other hand, Portofino 5 makes it much easier to develop a custom UI using other technologies. E.g. with React you can use https://www.npmjs.com/package/portofino-react-admin
 
Does it have any reporting facilities?

No. We used to include some limited reporting facilities (pdf and excel exports of database records) but we saw that nobody used those. You want highly customizable reports that look good; generic reports don't fit the bill.
In some projects we've used third-party commercial libraries to create reports from Word document templates for example, or even PowerPoint.
 
What is the minimum virtual server platform i would need to run it to see if its worth changing it all over to 5.2.1?

Anything that can run Java 8 and Tomcat is fine. We've added build scripts to create Docker images automatically for a Portofino application if you develop "the Java way" i.e. with a Maven project. You may want to look into the versions of the Docker images that those build upon, however this is just an example.
 
What other advantages does it have

It's more actively developed and more modern technologically. It's also less documented (at least currently, but we're working on that) and more oriented towards professional developers. Portofino 4 allowed for a sort of "PHP style" development where you could avoid a build system and just hack on the live application, which casual developers could pick up fairly quickly (also because the view technology was JSP). Portofino 5 makes that way of working not as smooth, particularly regarding the Angular UI. The less skilled developer will encounter a block earlier. So, it really depends on your business and your developers whether it's an advantage or not.
 
thank you very much

You're welcome! And thanks for your interest in Portofino.
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