Release Notes

Morph AppSpace PHP

2008-11-17T18:55:00.000-08:00

We've recently released a public beta of Morph AppSpace PHP using the same technologies and process automation tools that we adopted for Morph AppSpace Rails and Java. Now, developers have more choices regarding what languages and frameworks to adopt.

View a deployment demo or read the announcement. For more information on how to deploy a PHP application to Morph AppSpace, click here.

Morph AppCloud, warm standby database, auto-install, and more!

2008-11-10T22:18:00.000-08:00

Morph AppCloud. Built on Morph AppSpace, Morph AppCloud gives you the ability to create a private cloud to run multiple Web applications. Using a graphical cloud designer, components of your personalized cloud may be setup and automatically provisioned within a few minutes. Morph AppCloud leverages Amazon Web Services, including Amazon EC2 and S3 to deliver on-demand compute power and storage, respectively. Learn more.

Auto-Install. This feature allows users to instantly deploy and utilize any of the available open source applications -- El Dorado, Substruct, Tracks, Radiant CMS, and Beast -- to Morph AppSpace. To get started, click here for an introductory video.

Warm Standby Database. We've recently gone live with our warm standby database server. The way this works is that we have another standby database server that constantly retrieves the incremental backups created from the main database. The benefits are a) there is always a complete and ready backup, and b) in case of failure, all we have to do is let the warm standby retrieve the last incremental backup and switch over to it. This should take 1-2 minutes at most, and will ensure virtually no downtime. We still keep the full and incremental backups as well so, even if both machines fail, the data is safe and the downtime is still manageable.
Join our upcoming webinar, "Agnostic Database Replication with Binary Logs" for a demonstration of this feature.

Push Domains to Front Balancers (FBs) on Save
Previously, when you wanted to change your full domain name, you had to make sure to stop and then re-start your AppSpace so that the new changes will take effect in the front balancers. We've recently fixed this so that changes immediately take effect after you save your new domain name.

SSL and Data Transfer Usage

2008-08-07T23:37:00.000-07:00

Two more additions for Morph AppSpace subscribers:

SSL Support - Morph AppSpace now supports SSL. To apply for SSL for your application, head straight to your application's dashboard in the Morph Control Panel. You'll see an SSL section just below the settings section
Data Transfer Usage - You can now check out the amount of data transfer that your application has consumed by the month in the Morph Control Panel. This makes it easier for you to track if your application is going beyond the allotted data transfer threshold. Please note that we charge extra for overages. For more info about overages, click here.

New for August

2008-08-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

We are happy to announce the latest additions to Morph AppSpace.

Morph Status Page. To increase your trust in Morph AppSpace subscriptions we now publish our aggregate availability for everyone to see. Each major subsystem is monitored and the results of our availability is displayed. See the status page for more information.
Custom Maintenance Message. Developers can now customize the message that's displayed to visitors whenever their application is down for maintenance (e.g. when deploying new code). To set your maintenance message, go to your application's dashboard in the Control Panel.
Run tasks on event (Rails only). Developers can now schedule their rake tasks to execute when a certain event occurs. Right now, available events are "before application starts" and "after application has started." Setting your Rake tasks to run on these events is done via the Tasks tab.
Referrals console. Each Morph AppSpace account now has a referrals console where authorized users can see the referrals commission earned for the month. To view your commissions, login to your account in Morph Control Panel and head straight to the Account tab.
Fixes and minor enhancements. Various fixes and enhancement were also released. While most of these are not directly visible, the overall effect is a more stable, further improved user experience.

New Releases for Morph helpME on June 30

2008-06-30T20:45:00.000-07:00

We are happy to announce that we have just successfully released a number of new, helpful features and a patch to fix a critical bug.

We added a new theme — Harriet the Gray. For those of you who want to give their readers a fresh and clean-looking UI environment, we bring you good news with the addition of Harriet the Gray. The beautiful combination of the colors gray, white, and black produces a clean and simple yet elegant user interface that provides a relaxing background, allowing your readers to focus more on what's important — your content.

Grant user roles. With this release, you will have a more structured and a more organized collaboration with the other users, as there will now be four types of users, each with different rights and privileges. The four user roles are: Viewers, Authors, Editors, and Admins. See below for the definition of each roles.

Viewers - can view only the public UI of the site, whether it is set to public or private.
Authors - can do what viewers can do. Authors can also add and manage own pages.
Editors - can do what viewers and authors can do. Editors can add and manage any pages.
Admins - can do what viewers, authors, and editors can do. Admin can also manage user roles and can modify the site's settings, through the Settings page.

Set a Morph helpME site as public or private. Morph helpME users will now have more control over their site as this release includes a mechanism that allows them to set their site as public (available to anybody who accesses the site) and private (available only to registered users).

Note: Only Admins can manage the site's settings.

List resources in the table of contents. Users can now display their resources to the Public UI's Table of Contents, just as they would with pages. To do this, add a new or edit an existing resources and then enter the desired label under the "Table of Contents Label" field.

Fixed the bug that prevents Morph helpME from launching when the user trying to launch the application once modified his original email address and/or username.

Java, MySQL, Scheduled Tasks, and more!

2008-06-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

We're excited about the latest features we deployed today: MySQL, web-based DB Admin Console, and Scheduled Tasks.

MySQL. You asked for it, you got it! Morph AppSpace now supports MySQL. To use MySQL, create a new Morph AppSpace subscription and choose MySQL for your database. Note: this is only possible for new subscriptions, if youre application is already using PostgreSQL, you'll have to manually migrate the data to another subscription.
Scheduled Rake Tasks. We have also released a functionality that enables you to execute Rake tasks based on a schedule, eliminating the need to manually execute them. It's as easy as creating a Rake task, deploying it with your application, and scheduling it through the Morph Control Panel.
Web-based DB Admin. If you want to manually make changes to your MySQL database, we've also provided PhpMyAdmin.
Updated UI. In our continuous effort to improve overall user experience, we've also updated part of the user interface particularly your subscription management pages (you get there by clicking the Manage button of your application's widget). Of particular interest is the Dashboard where we'll be adding even more useful tools/widgets in the future. So watch out for that!

Other additions

Java goes out of Beta. About a month ago, we announced Morph AppSpace for Java and Grails in limited developer preview. We're very excited to tell you that this major feature is now publicly available. The Java and Grails community can now take advantage of our fully managed deployment, delivery and management system to side-step time-consuming challenges such as hosting setups and deployment tasks.
Affiliate program. Last week, Morph Labs launched its Morph Affiliate Program, a simple affiliate service that makes it very easy for developers and individuals alike to earn commissions through referrals whenever someone creates an account through the referrer's unique sign-up link. More info here.
Invite a friend. In addition, you may want to simply send an email to your friends, telling them about Morph AppSpace using the Invite-a-Friend option that can be found under your Account tab and at the sidebar of the Morph Control Panel. The Invite-a-Friend feature allows you to earn referral fees as well.

Morph eXchange

2008-06-11T22:43:00.000-07:00

Morph eXchange Referrals. We've added a Referral Program which allows all Morph eXchange users to earn points whenever a friend has created an account through the Account's unique sign-up link. You can initiate this conveniently through the Invite-a-friend option (found under the Account tab and at the sidebar), which emails your friend the sign-up link. You may also opt to share the sign-up link freely by copying the URL, which is the first code provided under your Account tab, and dropping it in various social media channels such as blogs, forums, Twitter, etc. You may also post a sign-up link on your website by copying the second code provided under your Account tab and adding this to your Web page. Keep posted for future announcements on how these referral points can benefit you. In the meantime, continue inviting friends to Morph eXchange!

Tracks 1.6. We've updated Tracks "Doing Things Properly", a GTD task-management application, to version 1.6. Get your FREE subscription to Tracks right in your Morph eXchange Subscriptions tab. Learn more about Tracks from the project Web site.

Morph eXchange

2008-05-21T00:52:00.000-07:00

We've separated Morph Control Panel (formerly DevCenter) from Morph eXchange and given it a warm cozy place of its own at http://panel.mor.ph. For those of you who were previously subscribed to DevCenter, you may go straight to http://panel.mor.ph and log in using your existing Morph username and password.
In the administration UI of Morph eXchange, we've added an invite-a-friend option in the Account tab which allows you to inform your friends and contacts how to easily subscribe to on-demand web applications through Morph eXchange.

Morph helpME

2008-05-05T05:48:00.000-07:00

Re-use subscription names. helpME now frees up subscription names upon unsubscription so that it can be reused by other subscriptions.
Back In Time and Rollback. Administrators may now traverse different versions of a page as well as make an older version active. This feature is accessible when viewing the preview of a page. If your page has been edited more than once, it now has multiple versions. To access the older versions, just click on the "Back in time" link found just above the page's star rating. If you want to make an old version the active version, just click on the "make active" link.

Morph Application Platform

2008-04-29T00:46:00.000-07:00

Email Notifications. Morph AppSpace will now send you notifications if you are running out of credits. This will help ensure that your services will always be available to your users.
Delete a subscription. Completely removing a Morph AppSpace subscription is now possible via the Delete button. To completely delete your application and all its data, go to your application's settings page and click on the delete button.
rfacebook gem. Good news for facebook developers! We've installed rfacebook 0.9.8 into our systems. Here's more info on the currently installed gems in our system.

Morph eXchange

2008-04-28T01:20:00.000-07:00

Users Manager modification. The Users Manager user type has been modified to remove rights over the Account Admin user type. Thus, the Users Manager can add, modify, and remove all other users except for the Account Admin user type. This addresses the issue that a user with the Users Manager role can create for himself an Account Admin user type and elevate his rights.
Enhancements to Sign up and add user forms. The Morph eXchange registration and add-user forms have been enhanced with a username-checking feature, to determine if a username input is already in use or is still available. We have also applied realtime error-checking for the password field, to ensure it follows the required format. The error notifications print dynamically without the user pressing the submit button. The same dynamic error-reporting is applied to the confirm password field and the email field.
Newsletter subscription. We've added the Newsletter subcription form among the Morph eXchange public pages for visibility and easier subscription.
Morph AppSpace un-deploy. An API allows Morph eXchange to update its records while a Morph AppSpace change is requested from the Morph Control Panel.
Enhanced AppSpaces Daily Usage date selection. We've improved the interface for the user when choosing which dates to review AppSpaces Daily Usage. One click brings up a calendar for easy selection of dates.

Morph helpME

2008-04-22T16:46:00.000-07:00

Fixed a bug that makes logging in directly to Morph helpME problematic
Fixed a security issue with authenticated cookies
Fixed a few bugs involving unsubscribing to Morph helpME. Previously, if an account remove its subscription to Morph helpME, the public facing side remains accessible. This has been fixed so that the site is removed immediately after unsubscribing.
Fixed an issue where upgrading a Morph helpME subscription does not immediately reflect in the Morph helpME administration page
Fixed an issue where a user's credentials are not immediately updated after launching a subscription from Morph eXchange.
Other minor fixes and updates.

April 16, 2008

2008-04-15T22:48:00.000-07:00

Morph eXchange

FREE Subscription to Tracks. Morph eXchange users can now subscribe for FREE to Tracks, Doing Things Properly, an open-source, third-party application that we've hosted to help you manage to-dos and tasks. To subscribe to Tracks, log on to your Morph eXchange account, click the Add a Subscription option found in the quick-links sidebar, click the Subscribe option under Tracks, and hit the Choose button in the Choose a plan page. Learn more about the application from the Tracks website.
Morph Credit cost per currency. You may now view the equivalent cost of a Morph Credit for the currency chosen in the main Account tab.
Support. Under the Support tab, users can now launch the ticketing system to file support-related questions. When you are in the Morph Support site, you may return to Morph eXchange anytime through a "Back to Morph eXchange" link.
Getting Started page. We've created a page to illustrate how easy it is to avail of our services. The Morph eXchange experience is as easy as 1, 2, and 3.

Features we have modified:

We've removed the option to re-subscribe an unsubscribed application. Therefore, once an application is unsubscribed, all data related to will be lost and the application will no longer launch from the Subscriptions list.
We've applied a subscription limit to applications where before it was unlimited. An application such as Tracks can only be subscribed once per Morph eXchange account if the maximum subscription limit is set at 1. Thus the Subscribe option beside the featured application will not appear if it has been subscribed to.

Please check out recently added datasheets and white papers in our library.

April 14, 2008

2008-04-14T00:39:00.000-07:00

Morph Application Platform

Tripled Bandwidth. Developers can now enjoy triple the bandwidth that we initially offered. See the Morph Application Platform information page for details.
Production Log. Developers can now directly inspect their application's production logs. In the settings page of your AppSpace subscription, click on Prod Logs and select the compute instance whose production log you want to view.
Rake Tasks. You may now run rake tasks right on your AppSpace. While in the settings page of your AppSpace, click on Rake Tasks. Select the rake task you want to execute and input arguments if necessary. Click Submit and watch your rake task go.
Retired AppSpace Sizes. We can now retire AppSpace sizes. When a size is retired, it will no longer be visible from the sizes drop-down field although existing AppSpaces that are already using it will continue to run under that size. We recommend switching to the next possible size when you find that the size you're using has already been retired.
Reserved Subdomains. Previously, when an AppSpace subscription is created, the subdomain assigned to it will redirect to the Morph eXchange homepage if the application is not yet active. We've changed this behavior so that subdomain will now show that it's been reserved for a particular AppSpace subscription.
Redirected Domains. Redirected domains, from the start, are only available to paid AppSpace subscriptions. However, we've been making this field available even if the AppSpace subscription is free. This has been confusing for developers on the free plan. We've changed it now so that the field is only visible in subscriptions that have a base price.
Change AppSpace sizes without stopping the process. Previously, developers had to stop their application's process before they can switch over to another size. We've changed this so that you won't have to. Change the size anytime you like and we'll take care of the rest!
Ruport gem. Ruport 1.6.0 and its dependencies are now available in our servers. Specifically, the following gems were installed along with Ruport: fastercsv-1.2.3, archive-tar-minitar-0.5.2, color-1.4.0, transaction-simple-1.4.0, pdf-writer-1.1.8.