SwingPBC

February 23, 2003 : Version 1.0.1 released!

What is SwingPBC?

SwingPBC (Swing desktop Project Budget Consolidator) is a desktop application that complements WebPBC, serving as a thick-client on your own PC.

It enables small to medium-sized companies to do budget consolidations on their projects. It is especially suitable for managers to review and analyse budget data that have been entered by their geographically distributed departments over a LAN.

SwingPBC directly accesses a central PBC database to retrieve the data it needs to perform consolidations locally on the desktop. It uses its own embedded PBC module, rather than that on the WebPBC server. It is meant to supplement WebPBC, especially when many users want to perform huge consolidations that might otherwise overload the WebPBC server.

Licensing : GPL

In keeping with CyberDemia's philosophy of openness, SwingPBC is released under the open-source GNU General Public License (GPL). This means you can download and run SwingPBC for free for in-house or personal use. Furthermore, you can incorporate or bundle SwingPBC into your own GPL product.

Features

SwingPBC uses the same configuration format as WebPBC. Projects can be easily defined (using an XML file) within a highly configurable hierarchy (refer to screen shots for example). Consolidation can be performed at any level in the hierarchy.

SwingPBC presents a simple and user-friendly user-interface. Consolidation results can be obtained by just a few mouse-clicks. Budgets can be saved to a portable CSV format to enable easy integration with many spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel. Managers can easily review change logs/notes that accompany data updates in the PBC database.

Technology

SwingPBC has been designed with small-business requirements in mind, so it doesn't require any expensive server. It is entirely possible to run SwingPBC using free open-source software. SwingPBC is developed using pure Java technology to ensure portability across various platforms.

Architecture

Click on the thumbnail to view SwingPBC's architecture.

SwingPBC is composed of three CyberDemia modules:

The Swing application front-end, named SwingPBC.
The main PBC business-logic module, where the calculations and other interesting tasks are performed. It persists data using the Jakarta OJB database binding library.
The generic Core module that contains some useful utility code.

You can build all these modules to get a fully functional SwingPBC application. Alternatively, you can develop your own user-interface on top of the PBC and Core modules.

Screen Shots

The following are some actual screen shots of SwingPBC in action. They were taken from a Windows 98 PC. This SwingPBC has been configured with a Country-State-Department-Project hierarchy.

Click on a thumbnail to view full-size screen shot
	Selecting a level-1 account for consolidation.
	Consolidating a State by its Departments
	Reviewing change logs under a State.

Services

If you are happy with the default SwingPBC implementation and is comfortable with building and deploying SwingPBC from source code, please skip to the next section and happy downloading.

Otherwise, CyberDemia can provide the following services to give you SwingPBC exactly the way you want it.

Build, deploy, test and support SwingPBC on your desktops.
Customize SwingPBC's interface with your company's style, logos, etc.
Build a customized version of SwingPBC with add-on features, such as exporters, charting and reporting tools, etc.
Build a new client program, such as a new Swing desktop application, to interface with PBC.
etc...

Please contact us to discuss how our services might be useful to you.