Share My Creation PostChat - Overview - Communication / Scheduling / Project Management Tool

Hi,

This is an application I've been developing for the past year, and I think will nicely demonstrate what is possible to do with B4J and JavaFX.

Most of the controls and features in this application have been created specifically for this application. For example the calendar / timeline control. I have shared some of those controls on the B4J forum already, but note that the jCalendar I shared earlier is different than the one in this video.

This is pure B4J + MySQL + SQLite

As a Pipeline Technical Director I have developed several scripts and tools helping Artists and Producers in their daily Tasks. PostChat is one of those tools, helping the organization and work load planning as well as improving the communication between employees.

PostChat is a user friendly, cross platform JavaFX Application regrouping all the key features required when working on Visual Effects projects such as short movies, advertising and small scale feature films. With PostChat, users can:
○ Communicate with through a Chat system allowing them to share links and images, broadcast information, and group chat.
○ View and create calendar in grid and timeline view.
○ Manage projects, create shot lists and assign tasks to artists.

This video goes through the main features of PostChat and gives a quick overview of the work I did. I have so far spent 14 months working on this project on my spare time.

Please note that this video only shows the client-side of the application. The user and team creation (admin-side) is not shown. Any comments, critics and ideas are much welcome.

● Disclaimer: All names and projects portrayed in this video production are fictitious.

Please visit www.jmontserrat.com for more information.

I'm currently working on B4A app that would connect and retrieve the information from PostChat.

Comments, critics and ideas are very welcome!
 

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jmon

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Great work! Very impressive.

Can you share some information about the UI implementation?
Thank you @Erel, and thank you for helping me through the creation process.

In this app I use all the libraries that are in my signature, except the jAgenda.

For the UI, I used the Scene Builder. The way I built the app is by making a class for each tab in the app. Because of the different users permission, I had to build a system that would allow me to use different build configurations and show or not show each tab, so using classes for each tab is nice. Some users in the company can only see the Chat page for example.
[EDIT] i.e. I have one layout per tab.

I designed a lot of custom controls, like the right panel you see in the calendar page. This on opens on hover, and closes itself when leaving.
Another great control is the calendar. I managed to regroup the grid view, the timeline and the 7 days calendar ( as well as a month by month grid view same as google calendar, but not in the app ) within one single library. So I can just select by code which kind of calendar I need.

To make it user friendly, many of my users asked me to have more animations. so I use a lot the transition library I did, as well as the animation and alpha animated methods that come with b4j.

For the drag and drop, I wrote my own drag and drop library, but I have to say it's very close to the one written by @agraham . For the PDF exports, I use the PDFJet library by @warwound.

One difficulty I had was how to use so many images and not run out of memory. I solutioned this partly by loading images only once, like the user photos, and saving them in a list of types. But I'm very happy about the responsiveness of the application. It's very fast, everything is preloaded from the database when the app opens. Once the app is opened, every update of calendar, project or task is broadcasted by tcp ip to the users, so I stop loading from the database.

I can give more precise details on more specific questions ;-)

[EDIT] All the chats and updates pass through a server. The server is built using the jNetwork library.
 
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ilan

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Longtime User
wow, awesome work!

are you going to sell your app? if yes what would be the price? looks really great and useful
 

jmon

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Longtime User
Very nice! Love your UI. I'm getting more and more impressed with te power of B4j (the whole suite actually) every day! Excellent job!
Thank you, yes B4J is awesome! Imagine that B4J is just 2 years old, and already so powerful!

wow, awesome work!
are you going to sell your app? if yes what would be the price? looks really great and useful
At the moment I am not planning to sell the app, I have to work on making it more flexible, and I need to build an interface to manage the users and permissions. Right now this part is still done through phpMyAdmin.

But I'd be interested to know how much people would think this app would be worth, how much you'd be willing to pay, and how much would be a fair price.

Thanks for your comments.
Jmon.
 

walterf25

Expert
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Longtime User
Hi,

This is an application I've been developing for the past year, and I think will nicely demonstrate what is possible to do with B4J and JavaFX.

Most of the controls and features in this application have been created specifically for this application. For example the calendar / timeline control. I have shared some of those controls on the B4J forum already, but note that the jCalendar I shared earlier is different than the one in this video.

This is pure B4J + MySQL + SQLite



I'm currently working on B4A app that would connect and retrieve the information from PostChat.

Comments, critics and ideas are very welcome!
Wow this is a great program, amazing, how do you manage to drag a frame from the video player onto your program, that is very amazing.

Congrats, how long did it take you to develop this software?
 

jmon

Well-Known Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
Wow this is a great program, amazing
Thank you.
how do you manage to drag a frame from the video player onto your program
Quicktime allows to drag an image out from the video.
Congrats, how long did it take you to develop this software?
It took me about 14 months so far, on my spare time (~1-2h / day). What took me the most time, is debugging the app. My app is currently used by 40 people, and they use the app in ways I didn't think of, but now I think they found all the bugs, and they are all fixed :-D

This app is still not in its final version, and I'm constantly adding new features. I'll post again next time I add new features.
 

barx

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Longtime User
@jmon Looks rediculously good. Well done!
 

alienhunter

Active Member
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Longtime User
@jmon Well done!
i am jealous about the timeline component , very nice :)
"What took me the most time, is debugging the app" ;) welcome to my world , since my apps are used in production
i have to take care of many scenario's that could happen , if not they scream .... "NOT WORKING" o_O
 

jmon

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Licensed User
Longtime User
i am jealous about the timeline component , very nice
Thank you.

since my apps are used in production
Yes, my app is currently used by 40 persons everyday. Most of the bug I have are caused by the "Null" values that java returns, it's always boring to always test if variables are null or not...
 

iCAB

Well-Known Member
Licensed User
Longtime User
Jmon, wow, wow, wow
I can't start to imagine the amount of work you put into this.
I hope it will be used by 40,000 people everyday.
Well done.
IMPRESSIVE
 

jmon

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Licensed User
Longtime User
[ - I've updated the link to the video in the first post (previous video was removed) - ]

Hi, so any possibility of "sharing" your code
Hi Mashiane,

If you meant the "source code", sorry! I'm not sharing that now :)

I'm planning to release the full program within a year from now. It's very close to release state now, I've added countless things in it: lots of Statistics, User Management, Project Budgeting, Holidays management, more task possibilities, encryption ... etc ... I've been running a closed Beta for about 3 years now, on more than 300 projects (personally used it everyday), and it's very fine-tuned for what VFX houses need. It can maybe used for other purposes or other kind of business.

I think it will be released for free, but maybe as a DonationWare. I didn't know about CareWare, that seems quite interesting. I looked at other options, such as Windows Store, but it doesn't seem possible to release JavaFx apps on it. I also had a look at Patreon, but I don't know if that's really something people use these days.
I wish there was something as easy as Android App Store, as I don't want to get into licensing! :) (even if they take a commission). If anyone interested in developping a licensing utility for B4J I could pay for that :)

In any case, even if it's a paid app, it will be very cheap compared to the other solutions available out there. Others have license per number of users and I don't want to do that.

Thanks
 

Star-Dust

Expert
Licensed User
Longtime User
Hi,

This is an application I've been developing for the past year, and I think will nicely demonstrate what is possible to do with B4J and JavaFX.

Most of the controls and features in this application have been created specifically for this application. For example the calendar / timeline control. I have shared some of those controls on the B4J forum already, but note that the jCalendar I shared earlier is different than the one in this video.

This is pure B4J + MySQL + SQLite



I'm currently working on B4A app that would connect and retrieve the information from PostChat.

Comments, critics and ideas are very welcome!
How long have you been impatient to develop it
 

Xfood

Expert
Licensed User
Hi,

This is an application I've been developing for the past year, and I think will nicely demonstrate what is possible to do with B4J and JavaFX.

Most of the controls and features in this application have been created specifically for this application. For example the calendar / timeline control. I have shared some of those controls on the B4J forum already, but note that the jCalendar I shared earlier is different than the one in this video.

This is pure B4J + MySQL + SQLite



I'm currently working on B4A app that would connect and retrieve the information from PostChat.

Comments, critics and ideas are very welcome!
impressive, congratulations
 
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