Morfik Watch Test

One of the most telling signs that Morfik is really achieving its goal of making the creation of web applications easy is how little you see the word "Ajax" employed anywhere were Morfik users are involved. I remember telling Fuad Ta'eed, then Business Development Director at Morfik, that "the best way to do Ajax is not to know what Ajax is...". This line has remained in my head since that day and it seems to have been well proven, in the mean time.

Morfik was conceived at a time when there was no such thing as Ajax. In fact, work in the very early stages of what would one day become Morfik AppsBuilder started even before all the technology pieces that would, eventually, be called Ajax where widely available. This way, work Morfik always gravitated around making a very easy to use, RAD, web development tool. This lead to all the aspects of what is called Ajax becoming the underlying plumbing which makes the Morfik Framework work, but with which the developer needs seldom to have contact with.

One of the more interesting aspects of this is that Morfik applications make, probably, the most intensive use of Ajax of any out there, and users don't even think about it. In fact the reason why it is so easy to design pages in Morfik is because it uses Javascript code to exactly position and configure each element within the browser, at runtime. This means that your design is not constrained by what you can represent in regular HTML, because the Morfik Framework will employ runtime manipulation of the page's DOM (Document Object Model) to exactly configure everything to match your design.

Keeping all this in mind, I guess the anwser to the question of where is the Ajax is simple: It's everywhere.

I had an interesting chat with a fellow developer who was frustrated because he had to do a lot of programming work, in order to create a business application with Morfik. At first I was a bit puzzled, but as we continued to discuss this issue, I started to understand why he was so frustrated.

Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 has a very slick look. It allows you to do some amazing things, very quickly, with its built-in control effects, thus making it really easy for you to create an impressive looking website quite quickly. This has a side effect. People that start to work with Morfik AppsBuilder (be it FX or BX) start to believe that whatever they want to do, it will always be possible to do it visually and easily. Well, that is not really true.

The fact that AppsBuilder gives you a compiler and an IDE, and not just a framework makes it possible for you to implement pretty much anything with it, but not everything you might want or need is ready built for you. Many times, speacially in areas which are more directly related to your business, you will need to engage in some serious programing and not just screen/page design.

Sure, Morfik's visually oriented design environment and RAD qualities will help non-experienced programmers to create web applications. They will, also, allow experienced developers to create sloppy applications due to their ease of use. This is a temptation that should be resisted, at all costs. It is fine to try to do as much visually as possible, for prototyping, for example, where you are not sure if you are going to keep what you are designing and need to get the prototype out quickly,

It is essential, on starting a new and serious Morfik project, to consider good programming practices and design and plan for it from the start. As with all development tools, when building complex systems, good design and architecture is much more important then the tool itself.

Morfik is a RAD, high productivity tool, but that doesn't mean that you will not be putting in some quility programming time when building a new system. What it does mean, we all hope, is that the tool will be continuously evolving and offering new ways to help you design the best pages and create the best quality code, with the least effort.

If you are new to Morfik and just about to begin your first project, set your expectations to a realistic level. Remember, your application is only going to be as good as you make it.

The same forum post that called my attention to guitaraholic.com also reminded me about how badly websites that are heavy on Ajax perform in regards to search engines. Morfik applications are probably as heavy as you can get on Ajax, considering that Morfik apps are composed of a lot of Javascript and a little HTML.

What this means is that Morfik built applications do not fare well when it comes to having their content crawled by search engines. In fact, this is the primary reason why this blog is implemented using a general blogging service, instead of running on a custom built Morfik application.

Another recent post on the Morfik forums, this one by Aram Mirkazemi, Morfik's founder and CEO, promises some improvements in the area of Search Engine Optimization for an upcoming release. Those of us interested in creating websites, instead of or in addition to web applications, can now cross our fingers and hope that this means the 2.1 release that was also mentioned. This would mean that we could be using Morfik in website building a lot sooner than I had expected.

Recently, during a meeting with several other people who work with Oracle business process orchestration tools such as BPEL, BPM and OSB, we discussed how you still need to write a customer facing application that interfaces with all the nice stuff you've put together in your service bus. Oracle's BPEL solution for example, makes it very easy to orchestrate a process through a series of Web Service calls, but has not provision for interfacing witth humans. Oracle BPM, on the other hand, does have the provision for creating human interfaces, but not the sort of interfaces you would like to expose to your customers.

This conversation got me to thinking that Morfik AppsBuilder with its facility for easily importing web services can be an ideal tool for creating such customer facing interfaces for business processes which are designed with these tools. It is quite easy to import web services in Morfik and it is, also, quite easy to use them. Morfik even provides a transparent proxy facility through the server side of your application allowing you to call web services from other sources than your own domain, should you desire to do so.

I did a short demo of Morfik, on my EEE PC, for two of the people in the meeting and even though it was running in the extreme conditions of such a tiny computer, both were quite impressed with the potential they saw in the tool. We separated that day right before lunch and when I got to the office after lunch there was already an email from one of these fellows to remind me to send him links and information about the product.

In hind site, it should have been obvious to me that Morfik would have been a great tool for just such a purpose. While developing what came to be Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0, Morfik played a bit around with the idea of orchestrating web methods on the server side in a fashion very similar to that used by Oracle BPEL or BPM to do so. This was eventually put aside as a feature for a future version, but the idea certainly had merrit and seems to be a great fit for the simplicity of web interface building in Morfik tools.

Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 introduced a large number of visual effects that can be applied to controls and Form bands. Among these effects is the gradient effect, which is used frequently in a lot of web pages and applications.

Despite the fact that Morfik provides a large number of options for the gradient effect, it does restrict them somewhat when the control or band you are formatting is using a very dark or very light color. The form designer only offers you dark gradient options when the control is using a light color and light options went it is using a dark color. This can be a bit limiting when, for example, you want to have a gradient that goes from a light color to an even lighter one.

You can work around this limitation by temporarily altering the color of the control or band to a darker or lighter color (depending on the case) and then selecting the specific gradient option you want to use. When you return to the original color, the gradient selection is retained by the control or band.

It is probable that this limitation will removed by Morfik in a future release, as it is not a technical limitation and it makes little sense to take away formatting options that the product already supports. In the mean time, you can get around this small limitation by using this simple workaround.

Morfik AppsBuilder completely changes the rules of the Web development for people with experience in desktop software development. This was one of the first that jumped at me when I saw my first demo of AppsBuilder.

Before Morfik came along with its compiler and development environment, Web development was mostly centered around text editors and scripting which were intermixed, but loosely coupled. Morfik changes all that by bringing to Web development the same RAD philosophy which has become a huge success for the development of desktop applications on Windows.

RAD or Rapid Application Development is a technique where you design the interface of your application visually and add glue code through the use of an event driven model. The event model was already present in the browser's underlying DOM (Document Object Model) and JavaScript engines and is well integrated into Morfik's visual designer.

The bottom line is that a AppsBuilder allows a developer who is familiar with a tool such as Delphi or Visual Basic to not only become productive quickly, but to actually outdo an experienced Web developer that uses conventional tools.

It is quite common for lists of information displayed in a web page to present a striped color pattern.  Such a pattern is useful for enhancing the reader's ability to keep track of what is written in a single line.

Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 allows you to work with two kinds of projects: Browser and Web. Browser projects are strictly client side, running entirely inside the browser and Web projects include both browser and server side code.

If you created a Browser project and found out that you are really going to need some server side code, there is no need to despair. Though there is no way to convert a project from one type to the other, you can create a new project and copy your objects from the other.

Copying objects between objects can be achieved in the simplest possible way, just Copy in one and then Paste into the other. This works flawlessly for just about all types of objects and all in types of projects, except for a small problem when you try to copy a form from a Browser project and paste it into a Web project.

Since Browser project Forms do not have any server side code, the IDE creates the server side module and class declaration and your form has been moved across. There is a small glitch in AppsBuilder build 2.0.4.78 (the first release build of AppsBuilder 2.0) that causes the member declaration for the controls in the form to be omitted from the generated server side code. It is very easy to get around this small issue. All you need to do is copy the member declarations for the controls from the Browser side form class declaration and paste them in the appropriate place in the server side version of the corresponding class.

This tiny issue taken care of, you are all ready to go.

As I mentioned before, Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 introduced several new design oriented features. Among these features are the ability to create fully transparent forms and to regulate the opacity of individual controls. By combining these two new features you can very easily create a watermark effect for your application or website.

The following picture shows a sample application I am updating to take advantage of Morfik 2.0 features. As you can see it uses stylized world map as its watermark.

Through all of the current decade, application implementations have continuously moved to a web-centric model. Most applications created are now “web-based” even when their sole purpose is to be usage inside a corporate environment. This choice mainly derives from the ease of use of web interfaces, from the familiarity that most users get from using the word wide web, and from the ease of deployment.

Web applications, however, though not difficult to create when very simple in nature become increasingly hard to code when their complexity grows. Most Web related technologies were developed as mechanisms for document definition and not really suited for the development of applications, making some aspects of their use cumbersome. This began to change some years ago with a set of technologies collectively known as Ajax, which allows for a much more sophisticated communication between the code running on the browser and the server. The use of these technologies, however, further complicates the development process requiring extensive specialized knowledge on several different standards (HTML, HTTP, XML, CSS, SOAP, WDSL, etc) from application developers.

Into this scenario came Morfik. Morfik AppsBuilder 1.x was an application development tool that allows developers to create sophisticated Ajax applications without needing to have any knowledge whatsoever of the underlying technologies. The Morfik AppsBuilder 1.x’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) directly supported several dialects of commonly used programming languages making it easy for many seasoned application developers to have complex web based applications up and running in a very short time. Morfik also makes it possible for these developers to reuse their extensive experience and segments of existing code, instead of having to learn an entirely new set of skills.

Having established an initial position for AppsBuilder as an environment for experienced software developers to create sophisticated Web based applications Morfik moved on to create AppsBuilder 2.0. AppsBuilder moved into previously unexplored country by adding an extensive list of visual design oriented features, making it much easier and simple, as well as much faster, to create a visually compelling Web applications.

At the same time, apparently based on user feedback, Morfik decided to consolidate the number of language syntaxes they supported in Object Pascal (Morfik FX) and Basic (Morfik BX). Both of these languages have been in use in visually oriented development tools for the creation of desktop and client/server applications for well over a decade and thus have large user communities who seem to be very interested in the prospect of having the same kind tools they used to create Windows applications for creating Web applications.

Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 goes way beyond what you could achieve in the Windows tools, while going out of its way to remain easy to use. I guess the best way to describe the new Morfik IDE is as a MASHUP of Access (for the database creation parts), Delphi (for the programming parts) and PowerPoint 2007 (for the visual design parts). This combination of features from such disparate applications actually yields an amazingly well integrated and easy to use design and development environment.

From my perspective Morfik AppsBuilder is an ideal tool for startup companies to quickly develop their prototypes and take their applications to production. It is also perfectly suited for independent software vendors with its high-performance natively compiled server code and its non-reproducible obfuscation for browser code which combine with a highly productive development environment and a reliable open source (and thus having no licensing costs) relational database server.

Of course, there are many other uses for Morfik AppsBuilder that range from creating plain websites (something which version 2.0 made possible) to fast prototyping applications (even if implemented in other tools due to pre-existing corporate standards).

Morfik has certainly raised the bar for how you design and build highly interactive web applications, with its next generation environment. At a time when even Microsoft haters seem to believe that all development tools need to look and behave like Visual Studio, Morfik takes a totally different direction tightly integrating visual design with application creation and making it all easy to use.

AppsBuilder 2.0 brings some much needed and very refreshing innovation to development tools.

I believe that anyone who tries out Morfik AppsBuilder, specially release 2.0, will agree that the best way to create an Ajax based application is to use this incredible tool and its great visual designer.

As you don't really need to know anything about Ajax to create a great looking web based application with Morfik AppsBuilder...

The first third party custom control for Morfik 2.0 has been created by PannonRex, a consulting and development company from Hungary. Mr. Péter Illés, the company's CEO and an experienced Morfik developer told me over a quick Skype chat, that he had just finished porting the old Analog Clock control for Morfik 1.x to Morfik 2.x.

The overall time for porting the Analog Clock control to the new custom control infrastructure was just a few short hours of work. (Four hours approximately.)

A short post has been published on the PannonRex blog.

Many websites use a glossy look on some or all of their buttons.  This glossy like look is one effect you will not find on the Morfik 2 Ribbon.  You can, however, as you will see, reproduce this same look using a simple technique: applying an overlay.   In this case, a semi-transparent rectangle which is placed over the control to add this glass-like feel to it.

Among the most noticeable new features of Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 are the visual effects.  These effects allow us to create great looking websites and applications with much greater ease than with any previously available design tool. These effects allow us to work at the control level, instead of working with a lot of small loose images.

 

Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 has extensive support for themes. This allows a website or application to be created in such a way as to be possible to radically alter the set of colors, fonts and control styles used in it.

The following screenshots show: first the default look of the main form of the BookCollector sample that comes bundled with Morfik AppsBuilder 2, and then the same form with a new theme being selected.

This is a great day for Web application developers. Morfik is releasing version 2.0 of its great web development tool: Morfik AppsBuider (codenamed M2).

The first thing that you will notice when you see the new version of Morfik is that the interface has been entirely redesigned. The change is so tremendous that you will be hard pressed to believe it is the same application. The new IDE employs some of the interface design elements of Microsoft Office 2007 such as a Ribbon-style toolbar. As far as I know it is the first development environment to embrace such a radical change in interface but the result is surprisingly good. The new interface is a great fit with the new enhanced design features and visual effects, though I have to admit that I could be a bit biased, having been present when some portions of it were originally created.

The second incarnation of this great web development tool has received a large number of new features, specially in the area of visual design and effects. In fact, there are so many effect combinations that you can apply to controls that AppsBuilder 2.0 might actually cause designers to retire Photoshop or similar tools for casual web design.

One other feature of version 2 which might interest designers is the ability to create pure browser based applications. These browser-only applications do not require any server side code or special server support of any kind. When working on with browser-only Morfik projects it is possible to create great looking websites. This extends the possible roles in which Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 can be used.

There are, also, some new features which are not visual in nature but that should be well received by developers such as helper methods that allow the extension of all of types in the Morfik programming languages. This feature is more likely to interest hard core developers than web designers, but is just goes to show that no one was left out when new features were being added to AppsBuilder 2.0.

Following this note I will post several others which will briefly highlight some of the most interesting features of Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0.