WebPBC

February 15, 2003 : Version 1.3.2 released!

What is WebPBC?

WebPBC (Web-based Project Budget Consolidator) is a Web-based application that enables small to medium-sized companies to do budget consolidation on their projects. It is especially suitable for companies that coordinate projects that are geographically distributed. The Web-based interface allows managers, accountants and organizers from anywhere in the world to access, update and consolidate budget data stored on a central server.

Licensing : GPL

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

Features

WebPBC uses multi-role user logins to ensure data confidentiality. The system administrator can define rules to allow only certain users to access certain data. 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.

WebPBC presents an easy and intuitive Web interface. Any displayed view may be printed. Budgets can be saved to a portable CSV format to enable easy integration with many spreadsheet software, such as Microsoft Excel.

Technology

WebPBC has been designed with small-business requirements in mind, so it doesn't require any expensive J2EE application server. It is entirely possible to run WebPBC using free open-source server software. WebPBC's business logic is developed using pure Java technology to ensure portability across various server platforms. It is tested to run on Tomcat 4 + JDK 1.4.

The Web interface adheres to proper W3C standards so that it can be viewed on any W3C-compliant browser such as Internet Explorer 5+, Netscape 6+ and Mozilla 1+. Persistence is implemented using a quality database binding API (Jakarta OJB) so that WebPBC can run on top of any relational database with a JDBC driver, such as MySQL.

Architecture

Click on the thumbnail to view WebPBC's architecture.

WebPBC is composed of three CyberDemia modules:

The Web interface module named WebPBC. This contains Struts actions, HTML, JSP, Javascripts, style-sheets, etc. It is CyberDemia's default implementation of a user-interface for PBC.
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 WebPBC 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 WebPBC 1.0.0 in action. They were taken from a Mozilla 1.1 browser on a Mandrake desktop PC. This WebPBC has been configured with a Country-State-Department-Project hierarchy.

Click on a thumbnail to view full-size screen shot
	Selecting accounts for editing.
	Editing selected accounts.
	Consolidating budgets at the Department level.

Services

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

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

Build, deploy, test and support WebPBC on your server machine.
Customize WebPBC's interface with your company's Web style, logos, etc.
Integrate WebPBC into your company's existing Web site or portal.
Build a customized version of WebPBC with add-on features, such as exporters, charting and reporting tools, etc.
Configure WebPBC to use your existing database for both data and authentication.
Build a new client program, such as Swing desktop application, to interface with PBC.
etc...

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

Requirements

You need to download the following programs to build and run WebPBC ( later versions of these programs will probably work too ) :

Installation

Download and unpack the zip file below. Follow the instructions described in README to build and deploy.

Download WebPBC (Binaries + Source code) (GPL)

Latest release :

WebPBC-1.3.2-all.zip (2.5 Mb)

Compiled with OJB 0.9.9, Struts 1.0.2 and JDK 1.4.1.

This precompiled release is intended for testing or evaluation only. There have been some reports of the JVM version 1.4.1 inexplicably crashing when running WebPBC over a period of several hours. The problem appears to originate from the JVM 1.4.1 itself, or perhaps its interaction with Tomcat, so its not something that can be fixed within WebPBC itself.

Therefore, if WebPBC is to be deployed in a production environment, you are strongly advised to recompile the WebPBC source using JDK 1.4.0 and run WebPBC on JVM 1.4.0. This has been tested to be stable.