About Portfolio Performance

Detailed information about the PP program could be found in the menu Help > About Portfolio Performance. The top panel contains the version, e.g. 0.67.0 from december 2023, the platform and the Java version it runs on. The platform could be Windows (win32, x86_64), Linux, or macOS; see Installation. The PP program is built with the Java programming language. The most recent Long Term Support (LTS) version of the OpenJDK (Java Development Kit) is obtained through Azul.com. From the copyright info, you learn that the author Andreas Buchen started development back in 2012.

Figure 1. The About Portfolio Performance panel.

The bottom panel contains links to the used (open source) software, code contributors, translators, and Writers. There is also a section about Installation Details.

Software

Eclipse Foundation: Eclipse is a free and open source software development environment that supports various languages, platforms and plugins. It is a very popular and widely used IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Eclipse allows developers to create, test, debug, and deploy applications using a common framework and a rich set of tools. From a user perspective, the choice of a specific IDE is not important. The development platform e.g. Java SDK however is very much.

Apache Software Foundation: Several libraries are used; for example to extract text and metadata from PDF documents, and to perform HTTP requests and handle responses (e.g. communicate with Portfolio Report).

SWT Chart Project: The Eclipse SWTChart software is used to create the line and pie charts in the app. PP uses the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) which is a graphical user interface (GUI) library that allows Java developers to create native-looking applications for different platforms. You enable this library in Help > Preferences > General.

Tree Map Library: Treemaps represent a distinct visualization technique for illustrating hierarchical data by using a series of nested rectangles. This kind of map is used in the Taxonomies menu.

jsoup Java HTML Parser: jsoup is a Java library that simplifies working with real-world HTML and XML. It offers an easy-to-use API for URL fetching, data parsing, extraction, and manipulation using DOM API methods, CSS, and xpath selectors. The library is used for example to fetch the historical prices from a table on a financial website.

JSON.simple: JSON.simple is a simple Java toolkit for JSON. You can use JSON.simple to encode or decode JSON text. This tool is used in the app for downloading historical prices from a JSON data source.

Protobuf: Protocol Buffers (a.k.a., protobuf) are Google's language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. The software is used to convert the XML-datastructures of the portfolio file into Java usable data structures.

Guava: The Guava libraries are intended to complement the core java libraries and make working in the Java language more pleasant and more productive.

JsonPath: JsonPath is a query language for JSON. It allows to select and extract a sub-section from a JSON document using a simple syntax that is similar to XPath for XML.

D3.js: D3.js is an abbreviation for Data-Driven Documents and is a JavaScript library to work on data visualization e.g. graphs.

XStream: A Java library that allows you to serialize and deserialize Java objects to and from XML or JSON.

OpenJDK: Running a Java program on for example a Windows machine requires that the Java Development Kit (JDK) is installed on that computer. PP uses the JDK provided by Azul.com.

Code Contributors

A link to the Github pages of each of the 159 contributors is given. A graphical overview of all contributions from 2012 till today can be found at Github.

Translators

PP has been translated into Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, French, Italian, Czech, Russian, Slovak, Polish, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), and Danish.

Writers

The two main sources of documentation for the program are the Forum (German - English) and the Handbook (German - English).

Installation Details

Clicking on this tab will generate a very long and detailed description of the environment PP is running in (OS, Java and Eclipse components, paths to log-files, ...).