IS THIS DEAD TECHNOLOGY?

153220

We've invested heavily in making OHJ work, and we've had great results. However, powers on high are asking why we're using a technology that eHelp and Oracle seems none too interested in improving or supporting into the future. Is there a development or release schedule that I can point them to? Is Oracle still actively coding and improving this product? If not, what are the possibilities of getting the source code?

Thanks,
Jason Holmberg
EMC Corporation

312396

Hi, Jason. We appreciate your concern and would like to reassure you that the Oracle Help products are alive and well. In fact, OHJ 4.1.15 has been released internally througout Oracle, though we've yet to post it on OTN. We may wait to post OHJ 4.1.16 to OTN instead since it contains a few fixes for running OHJ with JDK 1.4. We intend to release OHJ 4.2 later this fall, which will be certified to run against JDK 1.4. Anyway, you can point the "powers on high" to this post to reassure them that we remain interested in improving OHJ and maintaining happy customers.

- Ryan

153220

Great! Seriously, anyway we could get a potential feature list for 4.2?

153220

Also, we've been waiting a long time now for Javascript support. Any chance of that soon?

jrstephe-Oracle

We are working on a new branch of OHJ (it will be version 4.2).
OHJ 4.1 works on JRE/JDK 1.1.8 or later, however OHJ 4.2 will
require JRE/JDK 1.3.1 or later and will be certified against
JDK 1.3.1 and JDK 1.4.1. We have been using Java 2 features
for years through reflection, but we have been required by
our users to maintain JDK 1.1 compatability. Now the time
has come where we can require JDK 1.3.1 or later and make
better use of Java 2 APIs. The first use of this will be
an improvement in how help is displayed from modal application
dialogs. Currently, when help is requested from a modal
dialog, OHJ detects the situation, re-parents itself, and
shows help in a modal help dialog to avoid being blocked
by the application dialog. The disadvantage of this is
that the modal help dialog has be closed before interacting
with the application dialog. In OHJ 4.2, we will still
have to reparent the help to a dialog to avoid being
blocked, but you will be able to interact with the
requesting application dialog. I know that many OHJ
users will be glad to have that enhancement.

Here is a quick rundown of other features coming
in the OHJ 4.2 branch:

- Upgrading the topic display to an Oracle-modified
version of ICESoft's ICE Browser 5.2.3
- Allowing applications to register callbacks for
special links in help topics (i.e. a link in the
help system that launched an application wizard).
- Providing an example callback that launches a link
in an external native browser
- Switching over to a more standard XML Parser
(perhaps via JAXP) but keeping the current parser
as an option for backward compatability
- New Copy and Zoom/Font Size menus
- Better documentation for building custom navigators
and embedding OHJ Navigators and TopicDisplays in
applications
- Performance tweaking
- Bug fixes

First to come will be the modal help improvement and
the ICE Browser 5.2.3 integration.

jrstephe-Oracle

As for Javascript support, I talked with the director of the
Oracle Help products to get an update. I recently did an
evaluation of the Javascript module provided by ICESoft,
in particular the integration with the Browser's DOM (this
is what ICESoft provides on top of the Open Source Rhino
JavaScript engine). ICESoft has been working hard to fix
bugs in the Javascript integration layer, but in my opinion
it is still failing many tests. However, it may meet the
needs of a help viewer depending on what you wanted to do.
The managers of the Oracle Help product are reconsidering licensing the technology from ICESoft.