Morfik Watch Test

I use Morfik 2.0 just about everyday. It is a great tool, a great product. One thing I can't stand in the product, though, are those obnoxious sliding panels on the side and bottom of the main window.

Why should things keep moving in my screen when I haven't clicked on anything is totally beyond me. I use a decent computer to run Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0: a Core Duo with 2GB of RAM and a nice enough NVidia graphics adapter with dedicated memory and still those panels are annoying when you are just moving your mouse around and just accidentally happen to move over one of their tabs.

Worse thing is that I see no reason why the panels should not require me to click on them in order to come on screen. If I have to click on a tab to make a panel visible, it stands to reason that they will only appear when I want to see them, while if they just come up whenever the mouse moves over them, they can be triggered accidentally.

The funny thing is that almost everybody I know complains to me about these panels, and I sypathise entirely with them. I hope that in the upcoming 2.1 release Morfik either changes this annoying behavior or at least makes it optional.

What about you? Do you like the current behavior of sliding the panels into view or does it bother you too?

Morfik reports are a great idea! I have lost count of the number of times that some complained to me of how bad a receipt of invoice looked when printed from a browser.

Morfik reports by using Adobe's PDF (Portable Document Format) file format to represent reports allows clear viewing and printing of actual reports, without the default headers and footers added by all browsers. Add to this the fact that you can save, store and email your report to other people and you have got a sure winner for providing lightweight reporting for web applications.

Morfik reports are ideal for generating small printable documents such as invoices and receipts directly from your own web application, without needing to bring in the cost of a full fledged reporting solution, which can be pretty expensive, to the cost of your solution.

In version 2.0 of Morfik AppsBuilder a few bugs seem to have crept into the reporting engine, making more sophisticated reports come out with some issues. Hopefully, most of these issues will be fixed when 2.1 comes out, allowing Morfik reports to become the great tool they have the potential to be.

The subject of hosting an XApp came up, recently, in both the Morfik forums and the MorfikDev community forum. This is a very interesting subject which I think merits some consideration.

Morfik uses native binary compilation for its server side components. This makes it an ideal tool for creating lightweight and fast server side processes but it also makes it quite shared-hosting unfriendly. This is a very important fact for when you are designing your commercial roadmap for a business using Morfik.

If you need to have shared-host compatibility, you should be looking at creating purely browser applications with Morfik, where you can benefit from its visual designer and compiler technology and using other popular tools, such as PHP, for the server side programming. Morfik browser applications can be deployed through any server an can issue XMLHTTPRequests against any server.

When you decide to write your entire application using Morfik you need, in fact, to be ready to make, in fact, a commitment to a higher cost deployment environment where you will need to have at least a virtual private server. This kind of solution isn't very expensive these days, but anywhere near the $7 to $10 per month for which you can find shared-host solutions.

Morfik Technologies itself has been developing a special shared-host deployment environment for Morfik XApps, for some time now. A recent post in one of the Morfik forums containing a general roadmap for the near future details that this service should come online sometime in the second half of the year. I guess we'll have to wait and see this service works and performs to know if there is finally a low-cost way of deploying simple Morfik applications.

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.

Recently I was contacted by a friend, who has always been a web developer, about writing a small custom desktop application. He wanted to know if I could help a friend of his that needed a small application for calculating customer bonuses for a referral program.

I asked him why he did not do it himself and he told me that the person wanted a desktop application, not a web application. He went on to tell me that he had considered the possibility of writing the application using Java but it would take him too much time to learn to do a desktop application with Java. This got me thinking because this fellow has been a Java developer for at least six years (which is to say as long as I've known him) but probably longer. I've had long discussions about this subject, with lots of people that, in one way or another, are involved with Morfik and it seems to be a consensus that it is much easier for experienced developers of desktop applications to learn to code web applications, than the other way around.

As web development diverged from traditional software development the people entering the web development camp without having done traditional development have less and less notion of how an application that is build from scratch works. Most of these people have been creatin classes that get loaded by an application server or scripts that are embedded in HTML code for all their professional lives.

When considering this case it occurred to me that Morfik AppsBuilder makes the creation of a Web-based destkop application very easy. Actually, everytime you run your Morfik application from within the IDE or debug it, you are essentially running a native windows application that happens to work as a web server.

If you compile a Morfik Web Application project as standalone you get a native windows executable that will invoke the computer's default browser when executed. This means that you can just drop a link to a Morfik application on your desktop, for example, and double click it to startup the browser accessing its start page.

This characteristic can be combined with an interface such as Mozilla's Prism project, which lets you give a browser application its own window, which will allow your web application to behave even more like a desktop application.

While Morfik AppsBuilder clearly was not meant to be a desktop application development tool, it can do a pretty good job at creating an application that will run quite efectively and look very good while doing so.

Some months ago I got an Asus EEE PC 1000 HD netbook.  I got it so that I could always have a notebook on hand for writing. I have been writing books for 13 years now but I am having more and more difficulty to concentrate on what I am writing as my 6 year old son does the possible and impossible to ensure that I can't get any work done. :-) 

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been working on setting up and configuring a new area for Morfik Watch. Since I started this blog I wanted to be able to post some longer articles which I feel would not be a good fit for a blog post. This was the case with the seven page PDF document covering Helper Methods that was posted last December.

Though I prefered using a PDF for publishing that document, I still wasn't happy with it. I wanted these documents to be available online as part of the MorfikWatch.com website and continued looking for options on how to get it done in a way that was practical for me to use and good for the readers as well. I think I have found a service that offers the right balance and I have been setting it up and working on integrating it with this site with positive results.

Stay tuned as this new area should be live in the next few days and a longer article, similar to the one on Helper Methods will be released along with it.