Just a little announcement: ABMaterial for B4J finally got its own domain abmaterial.com! My brainchild is moving out…

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and support ABMaterial
Some fun programming projects and technology news
Just a little announcement: ABMaterial for B4J finally got its own domain abmaterial.com! My brainchild is moving out…

Click here to
and support ABMaterial
So, what happened to 1.09, 1.10 and 1.11?
Version 1.09 does not exist. I’ve changed it to 1.10 so I can use the major number as the main release update and the minor number for maintenance releases. e.g. maintenance releases for 1.10 are 1.11,1.12, etc… The next big release is 1.20.
Highlights of the releases:
All components are fully dynamic
In a ‘static’ page, all the components are written in the .html file. In a ‘dynamic’ page they are not. Only when you connect as a user, the components are inserted in their browser.
This seems trivial, but this actually means we can ‘write’ components (html, css and javascript) at run-time, depending on e.g. the user that logged in. Some user is allowed to see one chart, another user another chart. Or one may be able to delete a record from your database, another is not. Or showing a certain modal sheet depending on the user without having to add all possibilities in the HTML. Or show the page in different languages depending on who logged in!
New component ABMTimeLine
ABMTimeline is a component to present a time line of events. Using the ABMTimeLineElement you can create events, with some assets like images.

New component ABMFlexWall
ABMFlexWall is a simple galarie component for images. Together with the IsMaterialBoxed=true setting, it creates an easy to use image wall.

Speed, the need for speed…
Following all the guidelines of Google, ABMaterial is one of the fastest framesworks around. Not only in time of development, but this is certainly the case for the user experience. And all done in the background for you!

Firebase Auth and Storage support (1.20)
ABMaterial is always on top of new technologies. Latest in line is support of Googles Firebase API. You can use Firebase Auth to login to your ABMaterial (1.20) WebApp and with Storage, you can upload/download files with ease. Together with B4X Firebase support, you can build the most powerful apps ever.
New components ABMSVGSurface, ABMFileInput, ABMTableMutable and ABMPatternLock (1.20)
Always on the move, new components are introduced with every release. Donators can find more info on these new components in their mail. More on this blog when 1.20 is released to the public.
So check out the online demo abmaterial.com or download your free copy from the B4J website
Until next time!
Alwaysbusy
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if you like my work
ABMaterial public version 1.07 is now available from the B4J website!
What’s new:
ABMGenerator object: allows generating CRUD and messagebox modal sheets fast
Given a set of parameters in a couple of lines of code, ABMGenerator can generate several hundreds of lines of B4J code that only need to be tuned by the programmer to its specific wishes.
Refer to this post for more info.
Infinite Scrolling pages (e.g. like Twitter or Facebook)
With just a couple of lines code, you can create Infinite Scrolling Pages with ABMaterial.
See this post for more info and a demo.
Support for Google Analytics
more info and a tutorial, check out this previous article.
New component ABMSocialShare

New component ABMEditor

Read the README1.07.TXT for the full release notes.
Download ABMaterial Public version 1.07
Version 1.08 is going to be all about speed! But I’ll post a seperate article on my experiences here later on this. A couple of new components off course and some new functionalities in the ABMNavigationBar. Donators should have received this version by now. (mail me if you didn’t).
Alwaysbusy
Click here to
if you like my work
The public version 1.06 of ABMaterial is now available from the B4J website!
Some highlights on this public release:
Theme and controls have a Colorize() method to quickly change a theme
Getting more out of the Theme system. Just by using the one single line in B4J, theme.Colorize(myColor), you can change the base color of ABMaterial. You can of course still tune it manually.

ABMDataTimeScroller
New component to let the user choose a date through a scroller. Can be used to get the date, the time or both. See the demo for more.

ABMDateTimePicker
Alternative component to let the user choose a date/time. The date can be picked on a calendar, the time on a clock. See the demo for more.


Speed gain by using minified versions of the javascript/css files
This is just the first step in speeding up ABMaterial and the user experience both on a desktop and a mobile device. I continue searching for methods to make ABMaterial even faster!
Read the README1.06.TXT for the full release notes.
Download ABMaterial Public version 1.06
Donators will receive an email with the download link to ABMaterial 1.07 containing two new controls, ABMEditor and ABMSocialShare. A optimized TreeView and Google Analytics support is also included!
Happy programming!
Alwaysbusy
Click here to
if you like my work
The public version 1.05 of ABMaterial is now available from the B4J website! Three new controls:
ABMSlider: Add a slider for values with a wide range.

ABMRange: Add a range slider for values with two handlers.

ABMCustomControl: add your own components to the ABMaterial framework.

Some more highlights on this release:
Read the README1.05.TXT for the full release notes.
Download ABMaterial Public version 1.05
Donators will receive an email with the download link to ABMaterial 1.06 containing two new controls, ABMDataTimeScroller and ABMDateTimePicker.
Happy programming!
Alwaysbusy

You all know me as a Xojo fanatic, but lately I lost a bit of interest because the focus of the last year was so much about Apple, and Windows/Linux was a bit forgotten.
So I got back to my other favorite, B4X. And what a pleasant ride it has been so far! It truly is a far to little known gem with so much power under the hood. Creating apps for Android, iOS, Desktop and Server apps is a blast.
Being able to share code between devices, having a simple but powerful (free) IDE, a very active community and a developer that really listens was quite refreshing.
My next project was writing a Material Design framework for Web Apps, without having to write a single line of HTML, CSS or JavaScript. And quickly, it became obvious B4J was the one tool that could do it. ABMaterial was born.
Using very little code, you’re able to write beautiful (based on Material CSS) and powerful (B4J really stands out here) WebApps. The enthusiastic crowd at the forum has pushed me through several nights continuing to write on the framework and has made me, although some polishing is still needed, a very happy camper.
It will be very useful to write WebApps (automatically adapting to the screen size of your device), and I even see it to be great to write nice interfaces for your Raspberry Pi projects. It consists of 25+ ‘themeable’ controls and some easy-to-use helpers to design your layouts.
To prove B4J is really on edge with the latest technologies, Erels latest release 4.0 for Christmas now supports HTTP/2. Benchmarks showed a big difference in speed and will undoubtedly be very useful for mobile devices.
I’ve set up a live demo of ABMaterial on my modest media center computer here. So, be gentle with her…
Or if you want to try it out yourself, head to the B4X website, download your free copy of B4J and go to the forum to download the ABMaterial framework. The current ‘public’ version is 1.03. Donators get updates (1.04 as at time of writing) about 2 to 3 weeks beforehand so I’m able to better control questions/feature requests or bugs (aaarrhh!).
I wish you all some very happy Holidays and I hope I’ll see you all next year for some more fun programming projects!
Alwaysbusy
Click here to
if you like my work