Morfik Watch

Deploying Morfik apps to Amazon EC2...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:25:00 +0000

In a recent blog post, Shahram Mirkazemi of Morfik gives an extensive explanation of the first steps required to deploy a Morfik application onto an Amazon EC2 instance. In his article he uses a Fedora Core 8 base image to get the instance up and running, having chosen to deploy the application as an Apache loadable module on Linux.

It would be interesting to see this article and its follow up piece mirrored for deployment and configuration on Windows based instances.

Morfik Chats - It was good fun...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:02:00 +0000

I think it was a good experience for everyone that took part in one of the Chat sessions about Morfik. It was good to get to know better some of the people I've run across in the Morfik Forums or in the Morfik community at morfikdev.ning.com.

I hope to have chat sessions with those who have already shown themselves interested in sharing a bit of their experience with other developers and that more people will join with us, in more sessions in the future.

If you missed this first opportunity but would like to participate in the future, drop me a line. While I did have some information about interface building with Morfik to share, most sessions had great moments of general discussion about Morfik. Please feel free to suggest topics of interest for future discussions.

Some Morfik history and background...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 00:35:00 +0000

Yesterday a good portion of the history of Morfik was detailed in a nice blog post by Shahram Besharati, in the new Morfik Blog. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend you do so as it provides a nice perspective on just how committed the people at Morfik are to the idea embodied in the company's product.

The power of links...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:04:00 +0000

Since Morfik 2.x came out, I've had the opportunity to work on several small and one large projects using it. I also updated a couple of my older projects from Morfik 1.x, adding some of the new effects and replacing the code previously necessary to implement them.

It was just over the past couple of weeks that I really took it upon my self to fully port an existing application to the new Links+URLs philosophy of development and interface building in Morfik 2.x. It is a very different thing to build a small application using these new features and porting an existing application. If nothing else, the former gives us an opportunity to see how much code we're making obsolete.

I can tell you that it was a lot of code. Even though the application was already quite tidy, employing just the essential code necessary to create the functionality an visual effects I wanted for a basic content management system. A basic application to run a website with variable content, without requiring the application to be recompiled.

In an application with some 12 to 15 Forms combining the use of styles, URLs and Links I was able to remove some 90% of the code related to the interface. That was some 300 to 400 lines of code. All made superfluous by publishing some URLs and then setting the Link property for the right controls.

This experience gave me a much better feel for just how useful these new features as it made me really appreciate how much effort they save me. If you haven't taken the time to explore URLs and Links, I certainly recommend you do so.

A menu control finally coming to a Morfik near you?!

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:22:00 +0000

A new post that appeared today on the new Morfik blog showcases a menu system that is being developed for the next major version of Morfik. The lack of an actual menu control has long been one of the most criticized Morfik "features", even though it is already possible to build decent menus using the dropdown control.

In fact, Dmitry describes in general terms how the menus are implemented and the dropdown control seems to play a major role in it. Though we can't try it out yet, as a sample of pre-pre-release control/system I would say that this one gets an A. :-)

On-line discussion sessions

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:09:00 +0000

I was amazed by the response to my invitation to share some experiences through an on-line session/discussion. I'll wait a couple more days for any stragglers and then I'll be getting in touch with everyone that showed interest in participating so that we can setup these discussions in away that the time of day is reasonable to all involved. :-) Being part of a community with members from all around the globe certainly is nice, but it does have its drawbacks, timezone differences being one of the biggest I can think off.

Morfik blogs on the move...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 04:47:00 +0000

If you missed this so far, you might want to look into Morfik's new blog website. It seems that the people at Morfik will be posting with some regularity, as there have been four posts since the start of the year.

This means that the Morfik community will have another channel of communication with Morfik developers and if it should be a really good thing if they do really get into writing. If you haven't checked the blog out yet, please do so and cheer them on so that we can have more information, sooner about what they are up to.

Gather around the Morfik water cooler...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:52:00 +0000

As we start a new year, I feel we should try out new things. MorfikWatch has been up and running for over a year now, and I'd like to make the interaction between the blog and its readers more dynamic and foster more direct interaction among Morfik users.

To start this out I was thinking of doing a voice and screen presentation/discussion about the design features of Morfik, aka "how to make your application look good". :-)

If you are interested participating, please let me know by sending me a message. It would be important to know where you are, specially what timezone as readership seems to be pretty much scattered all over the planet.

UPDATE: I had some problems when I created this email account on gMail and it is was not working properly. This is solved now and the account seems to be working okay. As soon as I noticed this I pulled the article from the blog. Sorry for the inconvenience of any returned emails.

We can call this the modern day version of the conversation around the water cooler.

I'm looking at the possibility of setting up other on-line sessions with other presenters, covering a variety of topics about Morfik development, deployment, hosting, etc... Have you got any interesting ideas or suggestions?

A great 2010 for Morfik and for all of us...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:47:00 +0000

We are reaching the end of a year which saw a lot of evolution in Morfik. The intermediate releases of the 2.1 and 2.2 series brought out a number of new features and helped other features more fully mature. This month, with the start of the 2.3 branch we see Morfik turning to what is a purely bug fixing stance, which I believe is a good and necessary step to consolidating the feature set which is already present in 2.x.

While I have no idea what the long term planning at Morfik is, I do feel that we should have a couple more bug fix releases before moving on to another cycle of new feature release. Starting from the foundation that is Morfik 2.x, Morfik should be in for a great 2010, if they can avoid the trap of going to far, too soon. Morfik 2.x is a giant leap forward from 1.x in terms of both usability and productivity and it is going to be tough coming up with a similar leap for 3.0, so I hope they don't even try to match that.

All things considered, it has been a good year for working with Morfik. I have engaged in a couple of projects both personal and commercial which are totally done in Morfik and I've been very happy with the results I've gotten, but I hope to get even better results with whatever comes out of Morfik in 2010.

While 2009 saw fifty four (54) posts on MorfikWatch, I hope that this number will get much higher in 2010. I've started working on a couple of projects which I'm hoping will work out well and allow me to provide more value to the readers of MorfikWatch. I'll have to see how they evolve to see which will see the light of day.

In the mean time, I'd like to thank all of you that keep returning to MorfikWatch and wish you a great new year. Let's hope that 2010 will be great new year for Morfik and for all of us...

New update available for Morfik 2.3.0.3

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 14:00:00 +0000

The latest release of Morfik came out with a couple of small, but show stopping, bugs. These issues which affected how popup Forms were displayed, and how pure browser and Linux applications were compiled.

The overall impact was a total show stopper for anyone developing a static website or an application for deployment to a Linux server and so Morfik rushed to correct these problems and release an update as soon as it was too possible. This update comes in the shape of a patch that has to be applied over a previous installation of Morfik FX, BX or CX 2.3.0.3.

The patch is fairly small at around 7 MB in size and pretty much mandatory for everyone as it also fixes a couple of issues that were introduced in 2.3.0.3 regarding the usage of continuous Forms in a popup and an old standing issue with the repositioning of the navigator when forms are resized horizontally. This patch will update your Morfik to build 2.3.0.6.

Christmas present for Morfik users: A new build (2.3.0.3) is available

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:16:00 +0000

Morfik has released build 2.3.0.3 just in time for it to make good Christmas gift. :-) I have certainly been eagerly expecting this new build, which is bug fix release with a few small incremental improvements.

Among these fixes is one that is particularly dear to my heart which corrects a problem with the refresh method of lookup combo boxes. This particular issue had me doing an annoying workaround to get the desired "chained" combos behavio so that a list of cities is updated depending on which state the user selected.

Also among the enhancements and bug fixes are improvements in handling incorrectly formatted XML as to minimize the possibility of exceptions when parsing XML returned from another application. It is now also possible to consume Morfik generated XML in NuSOAP (PHP) server implementations.

Its great to see that Morfik is testing compatibility with other SOAP and Web Service implementations. Though implementing a standard should be all that is necessary to ensure you can interact with all players in the market, in truth it isn't as there are always subtle differences in implementations that might cause problems. Interoperability with other SOAP implementations is very important and it is one area where I hope to see more testing and development from Morfik. While my own applications are generally entirely implemented in Morfik, there are countless situations when introducing a new application into an existing corporate environment where the knowledge that you can interact with other systems is priceless.

Process Orchestration with Morfik

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 05:10:00 +0000

The ease with which you can create an appealing Web based application interface with Morfik makes it an ideal tool for rapid prototyping. It is possible to go from scratch to a full application interface in the space of a few hours.

When you combine this with the ability to easily import Web Services you have the makings of what could become a powerful tool for process orchestration. Morfik makes it very easy for you to write your own Web Services and tends to make the usage of third party Web Services. These capabilities can combine to make it a prime environment for putting creating applications that provide the glue for creating useful applications out of Service Components.

I am quite confident that the same team that made Morfik a great visual design environment for creating sophisticated interfaces could surprise us with the ability to visually design the interaction of Web Services with one another and with the application's browser side components. This would move Morfik one step closer to enabling even non-developers to create useful Web applications.

A project I'm currently engaged in, makes extensive usage of Web Services and is actually divided into several different Morfik Web Application projects. Many times while implementing some functionality in this project I wished Morfik had the orchestration features of specialized Business Process Management (BPM) tools. When using specialized BPM tools I always wish I could be easily tying the processes to an interface that that was designed with Morfik instead of looking like they were done by first week Web developers from 1995.

This is not the first time that these thoughts have occurred to me, as I remember writing a post about it back in January. Perhaps if I keep coming back to this topic, my dream will become a reality in a future Morfik X release.

NOTE: Yes German, I know. There is an issue to be solved with importing WSDL files which contain definitions for more than one Web Service. ;-)

Making the case for anonymous methods

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:28:00 +0000

I don't know about you, but I make a lot of use of WebMethods when developing a less than trivial Morfik application. WebMethods are extremely useful and actually quite easy to use, once you've got the hang of it. Depending on how much and what kind of information you want to exchange between your browser and server code, it can as simple as just invoking the RunWebMethod procedure.

One thing always leaves me with the feeling that I'm missing something, though. When you are using a Web Method from an imported Web Service, or even one of your own that requires more and more complex parameters, you end up having to use a callback to handle the method's return. I have no problem with the concept there, but the implementation could be easier to write. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just type your code for handling the method's return in line with the method invocation?

Just about every major programming language in use today implements anonymous functions and/or anonymous methods. I think this would be a nice addition to Morfik. This kind of construct is already defined in the C# language and Microsoft implements it in its implementation of Basic for .Net. The Delphi language which is the most used implementation of Object Pascal, today, has also added support for this construct. This means that a syntax is already defined and could be adopted, for all the languages Morfik supports, in a future release of the product.

Considering the innovative ways in which the Morfik R&D team approaches such issues I wouldn't be surprised if they came out with several other clever uses for this feature once it was implemented.

Setting somethings straight...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:49:00 +0000

It was recently called to my attention that some people might have an incorrect perception of my relationship with Morfik, so I thought it would be best to make sure everyone got the correct information.

While I did work with Morfik as an advisor and then for Morfik, under contract, for a period close to two years, I no longer have any sort of affiliation with that company. While at Morfik I worked on some of the business planning, product features design, IDE design and the documentation. Today I am an active Morfik user. I use Morfik daily in the construction of two websites and a complex corporate dashboard, multi-application, project.

The fact that called my attention to this possible confusion was that in posting a comment to a blog post I logged into WordPress with an account that was created while I was working for Morfik and which still had the @morfik.com email address listed in its profile. This lead to the original poster to have thought that I still had some affiliation with Morfik. I have corrected that profile, but it occurred to me that other people might, also, have gotten such an impression.

I am quite proud of having had the privilege to be a part of a team with such talented professionals as those in the Morfik team. While at Morfik, I got to know a lot of good people and made great friends. This however, has nothing to do with with what I write about Morfik. If I did not believe that Morfik is a great product or if I didn't use it my self, I wouldn't write about it.

Unfortunately, due to communications difficulties, created by geography, Morfik being in Australia and me being in Brazil, I had no choice but to stop working for the company. Since then, because I like the product and because I believe in what that team can accomplish, I've set my self to organizing communities of users and writing this blog. I've recently, also, become more active in posting to the Morfik forums as I have been spending a good portion of my time working in actual development.

I hope this information makes my relationship with Morfik clear to everyone.

Interface Building with Morfik: A Treeview like interface sample

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:41:00 +0000

In another recent article about interface building I mentioned that it is not difficult to create a treeview-like interface with Morfik, primarily through visual design. As an example I used a few screenshots from an application that I have been working on but for which I cannot make the source code available.

In order to help anyone that wants to build something similar I created a small sample project that just implements this single feature. The following picture shows what the sample looks like.

This sample is available for download in all three languages supported in Morfik AppsBuilder 2.2, through the following links:

This is the first time I have used Morfik FX 2.2 to create projects in the other two languages. If you have any problem using either the Basic or C# version of the project with Morfik BX or CX, please let me know so that I can look into it.

UPDATED: There really is no need for the Tree nodes to have the border around them. How they look is entirely up to your creativity. I kind of did it this way, in automatic mode, because in my applications I need to have this area well defined as I change the background color for each node based on certain business rules.

Interface building with Morfik: The database is your friend...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 02:35:00 +0000

Morfik AppsBuilder is pretty much built around the concept of a data-driven application. If you can get a specific information set out of the database, you should be able to present it with class in a Morfik application.

Though I've written a thing or two about this topic in the past, I can't stress enough that sometimes it is just quicker and better to do some coding in the database layer of your application. Sometimes a short stored procedure, which can be written in five minutes will not only yield the desired results but will do so a lot faster than a highly complex query which will take you over an hour to build in the visual designer.

Stored Procedures also offer you the opportunity to return special values for rows which would not otherwise be returned by your base query.

Several times, I've been asked about the availability of a menu control in Morfik. I mean... How is it ever possible to create a menu without a menu control??? Well... There are several different ways to do it, some faster, others more flexible. Some are even immediate. The more observant of you might have already imagined that with a little bit of reformatting that hierarchical representation from my previous post can be made into a vertical menu of the type you quite frequently see used in website navigation.

In order to make a horizontal menu with drop down submenus you can use the new Dropdown control. This is, in fact, used in Morfik's What's New page with great looking results. Do you feel you need to create a menu with more sub levels than that? Well, it is possible and easy to do so, using the same Dropdown control, however, I would advise you to revise your design ideas as they might be headed more towards a DOS application than a Web one.

It is not that I don't think that Morfik AppsBuilder could have a menu control or a specialized menu editor. I do however believe that it is much better go ahead and build a good looking menu in a couple of minutes with the available resources and move on to other parts of my application than to dwell on why is it that Morfik R&D hasn't spent a couple of months building a such a menu designer yet.

Morfik's database oriented design has helped me create several reasonably complex applications with very little coding. It does however require that you give some thought as to how you are going to divide up your pages into forms as each form can have its own data source. It is, in fact, quite common for you to end up building a single page from a large number of small forms, each responsible for retrieving some bit of information and displaying it in the most appropriate manner.

For example, the page you see displayed in the Morfik Debug Browser in the following picture is the end result of combining together seven different forms. I've placed red lines, roughly indicating where each of the forms comes in.

This is a screenshot of a test version of an application I've worked on recently and using totally bogus test data which tends to leave a lot of blank space in the page, but it should allow you to have some idea of how the structure for the page was created.

Whenever you think you've hit a show stopper in creating your Morfik application, take a step back and reconsider the problem. Most of the time it turns out that there is a simple solution for your problem if you just approach it from a different angle.

Interface building with Morfik: A hierarchical data representation

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:20:00 +0000

In the wake of my previous post I decided to show my dear readers another interesting thing you can do with Morfik, in creating an interface.

It is quite common for applications to have the need to present users with information that is organized in a hierarchical structure. In creating a desktop application we would use a Treeview control to display this kind of data. I've actually seen quite a few people asking for Morfik to incorporate just such a control.

Well, it isn't really strictly necessary to have a specialized control to get this sort of representation. The following picture shows a treeview-like data representation created with simple forms and very little glue code.

Observe that in this picture the nodes for the tree representation vary in height, allowing for non-cryptic presentation of the information as it does not really need to be abbreviated. You can, of course, also create more sophisticated hierarchical representations of your data. The following picture shows a similar representation but with the nodes being color tagged.

This representation can be achieved though the usage of form that opens a new instance of itself in a subform that it contains. It is essentially a simple recursive algorithm. In the case of the second picture all that was really necessary was to design the form and write about 25 lines of code. Sure using a treeview control might require less lines of code, but I sincerely doubt that you could design a Treeview control have variable color and height nodes, without manually coding the necessary changes.

As soon as I can make the time I'll write a two or three form application to provide a model or template that you can use to quickly make your own hierarchical views.

Interface building with Morfik: Multi column continuous forms

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:43:00 +0000

A blog post by a disgruntled Morfik user, complaining about not being able to create anything but the most basic websites without resorting to Web Methods and manual control creation led me to the conclusion that many of Morfik AppsBuilder's most interesting features go by unnoticed by many.

One of the features that I've seem people make very little use of is the multi-column continuous form. This kind of form allows us to create interfaces that resemble Morfik's own "Project View" In an application I've recently been involved in creating, we use this feature for maximum effect. In one point, for example, we allow the user to choose the icon that will represent a certain entity within the application's database. The icon selection form that is shown in the following picture was quite easy to create. The whole feature is actually composed of two forms.

Using nothing more than the MouseOver style configuration we can apply a nice rollover effect to let us know which icon we are about to select.

The same technique can be used to create other kinds of views for presenting information in your application. The following picture, for example, shows how data from several months is presented and color tagged according to specific business rules.

In order to try out these possibilities just experiment a bit with the ColumnCount proprety of a continuous form. I recommend that you try it and see what you can come up with.

Morfik 2.2.1.4 update released

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Morfik released a new build (2.2.1.4) a few hours ago. As with last couple of releases, this also focus on bug fixing and adding a few more features to the Form designer.

The continuous bug fixing over the last couple of releases has gone a long way towards making 2.2.x a more stable platform for application development. At the same time, a large number of new design oriented features has moved Morfik solidly into a camp previously dominated by designer tools, while remaining a developer's tool. Morfik AppsBuilder is certainly a much more designer-friendly application now, then it was a couple of months ago.

The new status bar in the designer offers some really useful information. Download the new build and try it out.

Organizing your application with Packages

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:11:00 +0000

Packages were introduced with version 2.1 of AppsBuilder, but it is in version 2.2 that they seem to be really maturing. Version 2.2 introduces several new features for packages including package dependencies and nested packages which open up the way for packages to be used as tool for creating modular applications.

While the packages introduced in 2.1 offered the necessary support for the Widgets concept that was introduced at the same time, it did not lend itself well as a tool for organizing your application. With the new features introduced in 2.2 that is no longer the case.

Why create a modular application in the first place?
There are two main reasons why it is a good idea to breakdown your application into packages: to make it easier to find stuff and to make it easier to distribute work within a team. The first one is a weaker as the built-in filtering feature of the Morfik IDE's project view is quite powerful and makes locating stuff rather easy, if you know what the object you are looking for is called. The second reason, however, is much stronger.

As one of three developers working on creating an application, I frequently find my self having to combine modules from different copies of a project. While it is true that you can manage projects of virtually any size through a good source code management software, I started to contemplate how packages could be used to break up projects into smaller sub-projects.

As it turned out there was a road block on my path to breaking up a large project into several packages in the form of the project's database. Any items moved to a package would not have knowledge of the database objects that were part of the main project. By the same token, if the database objects were created in a package, forms in other packages would not be able to see them as well. This looked like a problem without a solution, and it was until Morfik Appsbuilder 2.2 came out.

Nested packages to the rescue
With version 2.2 of AppsBuilder came the possibility of having packages being used by other packages and this gave me an idea: What if we were to put all the database objects into a single package and then have all other packages reference that one. As soon as it occured to me I set out to test the idea and it the proof of concept works okay so far.

My first quick experiment made one thing painfully clear though: you need to set out to create a modular application right from the start. The current incarnation of the project I am working on has between 50 and 60 forms, 30 tables, 18 queries and over 15 Firebird stored procedures. Almost all of these items would need to be changed if I were to attempt to break this application into packages. This is basically due to a feature in Morfik which is designed to ensure that name clashes don't occur between packages created by different developers.

You see, in order to create a package you need to have a Package ticket file. A ticket file can be quickly created from within the IDE itself and it reserves a prefix for your use. This prefix is then mandatory in all objects created within your packages. While the usage of this prefix does prevent two developers from creating objects with the same name, it also precludes the possibility of simply slicing up an existing project into packages as all items that were moved into the packages would need to have their names changed.

For new applications, however, it is a simple matter to create all database objects in a single package that is then referenced by all other packages that are created for the application. When creating packages that reference this database package it is a good practice to flag it as a required package. This will prevent anyone from adding the depedent package to a project without previously adding the required package with the database objects.

Breaking up an application into packages can be quite useful, especially since Morfik's own form based architecture leads us to create a large number of objects (forms) which are used to compose a larger one. This tends to leave us with several objects which are part of a larger context. For example, in order to create a user management module you might end up with several forms for users, groups, permissions, etc.

You can combine all these objects into a single package and pretty much never see these objects, unless you need to do some work on them.

Have your worked with Morfik packages yet?

Bugfix update for Morfik 2.2.0.7 is available...

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:22:00 +0000

Morfik released, today, a small bugfix update for all versions of AppsBuilder 2.2.x. This update covers a lot of small issues that still needed fixing after last week's 2.2.0.7 release, speacially issues related to the new Dropdown control.

Some issues with the rendering of semi-transparent controls in the IDE's thumbnails, and of certain controls in the new Zoom mode have also been addressed making for a smoother all around usage of the tool.

Morfik 2.2 is out and looking good.

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:30:00 +0000

Morfik has just released version 2.2 of its line of AppsBuilder tools. This new version has some very interesting new design features including graphical zoom in the form designer and a bunch of new graphical effects for the background of your websites.

Also changed in this version is how the form designer handles bands. The thick, three dimentional, band delimeters have been replaced by thin lines which interfere much less with your visualization of the design you're working on. The band names are now indicated outsite of the actual form design resulting in a much cleaner view of your work.

Morfik removed the sliding effect its panels used through out the IDE and the panels no longer pop out without being clicked on. This is a feature I have been long requesting as I always considered the old behavior distracting and many times annoying.

The list of enhancements is quite extensive, specially those related to packages and widgets which I will explore in more detail in a follow up post.

Download and try out this new version. It should be worth your time.

Morfik 2.1.1.3 update released

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:31:00 +0000

Today, Morfik released version 2.1.1.3 as an update to all versions of AppsBuilder. This is the first of several updates to be released. The update file is only about 6.5MB in size and can be easily and quickly downloaded and installed.

This update addresses several issues identified after the release of the first build of version 2.1, last week, and focuses on correcting problems with Apache plug-in modules and general IDE stability.

You can download the update directly from here.

Working with Packages in Morfik - The Basics

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:42:00 +0000

I spent an afternoon going through the basics of working with packages with Morfik 2.1 and thought I'd share with you my first impressions. The first thing that came to mind when I first opened the sample packages available (as a separate download) from the Morfik website, was that the concept was really cool.

With that thought I proceeded to take on the task of creating a package of my own that would hold the bits and pieces necessary to do something useful. As always, when you set out to test some new technique or product version all ideas seemed to vanish so I just decided that I would do a package that allowed me to insert a blog-like list of articles into any application. That seemed simple enough and as it turns out it really is.

When you first decide to create a package you will need to get a package-ticket with Morfik. This ticket will reserve a three to six letter prefix for your use in creating your personal or business packages. This is handled directly in the New Package Wizard and the ticket is issued immediately. No bureaucracy, no wait.

When you complete the Wizard, while Morfik is "opening" the newly created package, an error is generated. You can safely press cancel and proceed to work in the package. This error is harmless and the result of a simple inversion in the order in which these items are opened after being created. As it turns out the IDE is trying to first open a test form containing a blank widget, before the widget's creation has been completed. (Or something of the sort.:-) This issue should be corrected in a minor point release that Morfik will be making available soon.

Once you have created the package you will have a project which contains one form and one widget. The form is useful for you to test the objects you are creating within your package, without having to continuously add and remove it from other projects. The Package project can be run as it if it were a standard application. The actual redistributable file with the extention MFKPackage is actually quite small, if you haven't added large resources to the project.

Adding resources to a package is an interesting area to consider as all packages you create will share a common resource root folder which has your package prefix, followed by an underscore as its name. In the case of MorfikWatch, for example, the folder is called mfw_. This means that you cannot have two packages that use the same name for two different images, as long as you plan on using them on the same project.

I'm not sure putting all the images for all packages I'll ever create in the same folder is the best design decision, but I understand that it's objective is to avoid having the same image added more than once to any single project. In that regard, this is probably a good decision.

It is obvious that Morfik considers Packages a natural environment for Widgets as any new Package comes with a pre-created Widget. The new features do really seem like an ideal match, as Widgets allow you to your own controls and packages provide a convenient mechanism for distributing them within your team or your customers.

Packages can, also, be great facilitators for larger developer groups. A project can be logically divided into packages so that it's development can be easily handled by different developers.

What other uses can you think of for Morfik Packages?

Integrated Hosting + Powerful Visual Design = Morfik 2.1

noreply@blogger.com (Mauricio Longo) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 05:56:00 +0000

I wish I could say that I took the time to experiment with Morfik's Integrated Hosting service, but that would be largely overstating what I, actually, did. Once you go have your project ready for deployment, the process is as simple as following a Wizard. The main decision I was required to make was the sub-domain name that I would use with my account.

Not surprisingly I chose MorfikWatch :-) as the sub-domain name for my Morfik hosted applications. After just a couple of clicks I had the application compiled and deployed as shown in the following picture.

Deploying an application couldn't really be much simpler than that.

When you combine this ease of getting a ready application deployed with the traditionally easy Morfik visual design, you get the one of the best possible solutions for deploying small sites and applications. In fact, the power of the visual designer in Morfik 2.1 has been further enhanced with the ability to customize more in more detail how effects are applied to controls in creating styles.

The combination of the ease and power of visual design with the ease and speed of the Integrated Hosting might come to attract a good number of freelance web designers to become Morfik users.