Why Upgrade from LGPL?

Why Upgrade?

If you’re a user of the free LGPL version of our products, you may be wondering if now is the right time to upgrade to a full version. Most users don’t realize how many immediate benefits come from an upgrade to Pro or above, without the need to rework how your application functions.

This is a rare opportunity to purchase new licenses and optional modules at 30% off until the end of the year. If you are upgrading an existing Pro, Power, or Enterprise license from a previous version, we’ll stack an additional 30% discount on top of the discount you receive for owning a qualifying older license. Contact sales for an upgrade quote today!

Benefits of upgrading to Pro+ Edition

1.  Export to Excel and other formats

Whether you’re using REST-based integration, GWT-RPC or something custom – you can export to Excel and other formats as soon as you install our server .jars and servlets without reworking how your application loads data. This approach, called a “client-driven export”, works with any ListGrid or TreeGrid and only requires a single method call – listGrid.exportClientData().

2.  Print to PDF

Make any printable screen into a .PDF without reworking your application in any way, again using a single method call – RPCManager.exportContent(). Server-side APIs allow you to capture the generated PDF so that you can attach it to email, save it to disk, or whatever else you need. This feature makes any UI you build into a simple “report”, and may obviate the need to install and configure separate reporting packages.

3.  Charts

Pro Edition and above include our HTML5 charting engine, with powerful features like:

• Dual-axis and 3-axis charts
• Log scale charts (examples: SmartClient; Smart GWT)
• Switching chart types on the fly (examples: SmartClient; Smart GWT)
• Zoom-able charts (coming soon)
• Statistics features like curve fitting (coming soon)

You could argue indefinitely about the relative merits of our built-in engine vs. other commercial packages you could integrate into your application. However, any quality add-on from a third party would cost nearly as much as a Pro license, but only give you charts. In addition, you’d have to integrate it yourself with possibly serious technical hurdles around printing, export to PDF, drag and drop with other components, and other things that our built-in charts do automatically.

The charting engine in Pro+ Edition is a no-brainer decision for anyone who currently uses the LGPL Edition and needs charts.

4.  Reify (and other tools)

Reify allows you to transform Balsamiq mockups into working screens backed by clean, clear code. Screens imported via Reify can be added to an existing application without changing its data binding approaches or architecture in any way. Components in Reify screens can connect to RestDataSource or any other type of DataSource, and screens generated in Reify can be placed into layouts and other containers created in a normal hand-coded application.

 Reify lets you keep everything you’ve already built, and add new functionality with a radically improved and more efficient process.

5.  Peace of mind

Many corporate legal departments are allergic to OSS licenses and would prefer to see a standard commercial license. But, perhaps more importantly, any innovative company today is exposed to tremendous risk from “patent trolls” – litigious companies that holding dubious patents and make a business out of suing other companies. Legal defense costs can easily run into the millions, even when the lawsuit is baseless.

• Do you have staff that can provide clear evidence that a web-related patent is invalid due to prior art?
• If the best option is to give in and settle even when you’re in the right, are you prepared to create and maintain a fork of our products in order to avoid the bogus patents at issue?

Among other “peace of mind” terms, Enterprise licenses allow you to secure Isomorphic’s future assistance in such matters before the issue comes up.

More benefits in the future

These are just the immediate benefits you get from upgrading to Pro+ Edition, without reworking any of your existing code. Longer term, you can incrementally switch over to using more features, still with a minimum amount of rework.

For example, you can convert a RestDataSource or other client-side DataSource to a server-based DataSource, but still use DMI to call existing business logic. This gives you access to a wide variety of server features, including; Declarative Security, Server-side Validation, and Transaction Chaining and allows you to delete a lot of repetitive, “boilerplate” code. This approach leaves your actual business and persistence logic intact and unchanged, and can even be done on an incremental, screen-by-screen or DataSource-by-DataSource basis.

How to make it happen

Are you an engineer wishing you could use the more advanced versions of our software, and frustrated by your company re-implementing the features of Pro+?  Out of the features above, we feel that the Reify tool and this intro video will play best with management, but don’t discount the power of argument #5 (Peace of Mind). Strange as it may seem, raising the legal and risk-related benefits of a relationship with Isomorphic may be the way you get the upgrade you want.

Now is the perfect time to buy one of our commercial licenses and super-charge your applications, so don’t delay. Buy online, or contact sales for a quote today!

Enjoy!

The Isomorphic Team