I've been invited by a local Morfik user to present a series of sessions, in a day long event, about Morfik AppsBuilder. This user, Fabiano Costa, got the idea from a recent post where I mentioned my presence at the Firebird Developer's Day event that happened recently in the city of Piracicaba, in Brazil.
I had not doubts about accepting the invitation, even though I have no real idea of what the number of interested people in the region is like. I have a long standing passion for Morfik and can't really resist an opportunity to talk about the product. (As any readers of this blog might have noticed.)
So... It seems that Brazil will be the first country to have a Morfik Developer's Day, which should happen in September. Hopefully, Morfik 2.1 will be out by then and I'll have even more interesting things to talk about.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Firebird Developer's Day
Yesterday I presented a session on data organization and modeling for websites at the 6th Firebird Developer's Day, in Piracicaba, Brazil. This is an annual event that draws in from five to seven hundred people, every time.
As with the previous versions of the event, everything ran quite smoothly and I had the opportunity to chat with a lot of people in the Firebird usar community. I ran into several people that asked for information about Morfik and used some of my free time to demo AppsBuilder 2.0.5.27 to some of my fellow speakers. As usual, everyone liked Morfik's current generation designers and visual effects, immediatelly.
The usage and general interest in Morfik in Brazil continues to grow, from I can see and I noticed that some objections to the product, raised by early testers, seem to be in the list of new features slated to be present in Morfik 2.1, which should be comming out next month. That seems like a nice indication that Morfik is moving in the right direction with its evolution of the product.
As with the previous versions of the event, everything ran quite smoothly and I had the opportunity to chat with a lot of people in the Firebird usar community. I ran into several people that asked for information about Morfik and used some of my free time to demo AppsBuilder 2.0.5.27 to some of my fellow speakers. As usual, everyone liked Morfik's current generation designers and visual effects, immediatelly.
The usage and general interest in Morfik in Brazil continues to grow, from I can see and I noticed that some objections to the product, raised by early testers, seem to be in the list of new features slated to be present in Morfik 2.1, which should be comming out next month. That seems like a nice indication that Morfik is moving in the right direction with its evolution of the product.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Sometimes simple isn't really simple at all
This afternoon I was working on creating a hierarchical visualization for a set of data, using Morfik. Essentially, what I wished to accomplish was a tree-like representation of a rather complex set of data.
Well, Morfik being a tool that is geared towards the creation of data-driven applications it seemed just too easy. I had a friend sitting besides me and I smugly thought to my self that I would show him just how easy it is to create such a representation in Morfik.
Two hours later I was still trying to achieve the results I wanted, though not due to any fault of Morfik AppsBuilder. If anything, AppsBuilder made things too easy. So easy that I simply didn't bother to build my data access as I should have done, instead I just went for visually creating a query with a subquery. Then I got bogged down when in some situations the query did no return the result set I expected. I spent most of those two hours trying to coerce this query into giving me the information I wanted, when I wanted it, to no avail.
It was then that I decided that it would probably be simpler, not to try to be so simple minded. In about ten minutes I had writen a stored procedure which gave me exactly the result set I expected, when I expected and had it plugged-in to my Morfik application.
Normally I would argue that using a visual query builder is simpler than hand coding your own data access in stored procedures, however, in this specific case the exact opposite is true. There are several good tools in the market for direct manipulation of Firebird databases, inclusing some free ones. If you haven't tried out some of these tools, I recommend that you do so as it is not possible to create triggers or stored procedures from within the Morfik environment.
Well, Morfik being a tool that is geared towards the creation of data-driven applications it seemed just too easy. I had a friend sitting besides me and I smugly thought to my self that I would show him just how easy it is to create such a representation in Morfik.
Two hours later I was still trying to achieve the results I wanted, though not due to any fault of Morfik AppsBuilder. If anything, AppsBuilder made things too easy. So easy that I simply didn't bother to build my data access as I should have done, instead I just went for visually creating a query with a subquery. Then I got bogged down when in some situations the query did no return the result set I expected. I spent most of those two hours trying to coerce this query into giving me the information I wanted, when I wanted it, to no avail.
It was then that I decided that it would probably be simpler, not to try to be so simple minded. In about ten minutes I had writen a stored procedure which gave me exactly the result set I expected, when I expected and had it plugged-in to my Morfik application.
Normally I would argue that using a visual query builder is simpler than hand coding your own data access in stored procedures, however, in this specific case the exact opposite is true. There are several good tools in the market for direct manipulation of Firebird databases, inclusing some free ones. If you haven't tried out some of these tools, I recommend that you do so as it is not possible to create triggers or stored procedures from within the Morfik environment.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
PannonRex introduces a specialized Morfik hosting service
Today PannonRex, a company well known for doing Morfik consulting and custom control development, announced that it is introducing a specialized hosting service for Morfik applications.
According to Péter Illés, PannonRex's CEO, the service will be custom fitted to the users needs, instead of being a fixed set of pre-defined offerings. The main goal is to provide a managed hosting service that can handle special needs in terms of service integration (payment gateways, for example), or resource requirements.
Mr. Illés explained that while the service was being announced today, it was developed as an extension to custom hosting services already being provided for a few companies that developed Morfik applications and turned to PannonRex for help when it was time to deploy them.
With the introduction of this service Morfik developers will have a speacialized service provider where to take their applications, should they outgrow the application hosting service which will be provided by Morfik itself. Being a company focused on Morfik application development, consulting and hosting, PannonRex will be the one to go to if your application needs a dedicated server, or multiple servers, and you want the support of a team that is familiar with your applications chosen technology.
According to Péter Illés, PannonRex's CEO, the service will be custom fitted to the users needs, instead of being a fixed set of pre-defined offerings. The main goal is to provide a managed hosting service that can handle special needs in terms of service integration (payment gateways, for example), or resource requirements.
Mr. Illés explained that while the service was being announced today, it was developed as an extension to custom hosting services already being provided for a few companies that developed Morfik applications and turned to PannonRex for help when it was time to deploy them.
With the introduction of this service Morfik developers will have a speacialized service provider where to take their applications, should they outgrow the application hosting service which will be provided by Morfik itself. Being a company focused on Morfik application development, consulting and hosting, PannonRex will be the one to go to if your application needs a dedicated server, or multiple servers, and you want the support of a team that is familiar with your applications chosen technology.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Morfik Languages: C# or something else?
Anyone that has taken an interest in Morfik AppsBuilder 2.0 knows that it is available in two editions: FX (Pascal) and BX (Basic). That is huge change to what you would find in AppsBuilder 1.4 which supported four different languages (Pascal, Basic, C# and MorfikJ a.k.a. Java) in a single version.
I have no idea why Morfik decided to separate the languages in 2.0 and have a separate edition for each language, but I imagine the reason they left C# and Java out was that these languages had drawn much less interest than Pascal and Basic and their compilers were not up to the level of the Pascal and Basic ones. In a previous post I presented a list of new features that were mentioned as being underway for version 2.1 by Aram Mirkazemi (Morfik CEO). Among these features was should be actually a whole new edition: C#.
There is a huge number of people around the world that work daily with languages from the C-family of programming languages and which would feel more at home working with a more familiar language. With this consideration in mind I would say that having C# support would be a nice thing. There is another question that comes into play, however. Most people that here the name C# would immediately expect to find support to the .net library, which is essentially the runtime library for the C# language. Morfik, however, has its own framework which has very little, or nothing, to do with .net. This might lead to people being disappointed with the C# edition and not taking up Morfik at all.
I feel it would be a better move for Morfik to add support for a c-family programming language but not call it C# as it will be working with a framework entirely different from what C# developers are used to and will have features that C# does not, in order to fully support the Morfik Framework. Having a language similar to C# and Java could be an asset but calling the language C# or Java could actually work out to hinder the adoption of the language and consequently the tool itself.
What do you think?
I have no idea why Morfik decided to separate the languages in 2.0 and have a separate edition for each language, but I imagine the reason they left C# and Java out was that these languages had drawn much less interest than Pascal and Basic and their compilers were not up to the level of the Pascal and Basic ones. In a previous post I presented a list of new features that were mentioned as being underway for version 2.1 by Aram Mirkazemi (Morfik CEO). Among these features was should be actually a whole new edition: C#.
There is a huge number of people around the world that work daily with languages from the C-family of programming languages and which would feel more at home working with a more familiar language. With this consideration in mind I would say that having C# support would be a nice thing. There is another question that comes into play, however. Most people that here the name C# would immediately expect to find support to the .net library, which is essentially the runtime library for the C# language. Morfik, however, has its own framework which has very little, or nothing, to do with .net. This might lead to people being disappointed with the C# edition and not taking up Morfik at all.
I feel it would be a better move for Morfik to add support for a c-family programming language but not call it C# as it will be working with a framework entirely different from what C# developers are used to and will have features that C# does not, in order to fully support the Morfik Framework. Having a language similar to C# and Java could be an asset but calling the language C# or Java could actually work out to hinder the adoption of the language and consequently the tool itself.
What do you think?
Monday, May 25, 2009
New features in Morfik 2.1
Aram Mirkazemi, Morfik's CEO and main architect, presented a new list of features for Morfik AppsBuilder 2.1, in a recent forum post. This post presents an interesting list of features that which Mirkazemi says will be available by the end of the second quarter of 2009.
Here are some of the highlights:
1. Page Architecture and Search Engine Optimization - Pages are a new kind of project object. During the beta phase of AppsBuilder 2.0 there was a period where a Page object was available as well. This might be a refinement of that concept.
2. Plug-in architecture for controls, downloadable plug-ins - It seems that Morfik will be making available sample plug-ins to demo the usage of this architecture, when 2.1 is released. The only sample specifically identified is a plug-in for handling user authentication. This new architecture will form the basis for new and more powerful controls.
3. Editable continuous forms - This is presented as a subitem of the previous one in the original post, but anyone that has done any serious development with Morfik AppsBuilder should know that it deserves a special place of its own. This will be available as a third type of form (single, continuous and now grid).
4. Push button XApp hosting platform - This service is supposed to be available in a similar time frame to AppsBuilder 2.1 and will in fact require it in order to be used.
5. C# Support - A version of Morfik AppsBuilder using C# as its programming language is supposed to be available when 2.1 is finally released.
Another item of interest in the post is that the update to the Morfik documentation has been delayed and should not be available in the same time frame as 2.1.
Here are some of the highlights:
1. Page Architecture and Search Engine Optimization - Pages are a new kind of project object. During the beta phase of AppsBuilder 2.0 there was a period where a Page object was available as well. This might be a refinement of that concept.
2. Plug-in architecture for controls, downloadable plug-ins - It seems that Morfik will be making available sample plug-ins to demo the usage of this architecture, when 2.1 is released. The only sample specifically identified is a plug-in for handling user authentication. This new architecture will form the basis for new and more powerful controls.
3. Editable continuous forms - This is presented as a subitem of the previous one in the original post, but anyone that has done any serious development with Morfik AppsBuilder should know that it deserves a special place of its own. This will be available as a third type of form (single, continuous and now grid).
4. Push button XApp hosting platform - This service is supposed to be available in a similar time frame to AppsBuilder 2.1 and will in fact require it in order to be used.
5. C# Support - A version of Morfik AppsBuilder using C# as its programming language is supposed to be available when 2.1 is finally released.
Another item of interest in the post is that the update to the Morfik documentation has been delayed and should not be available in the same time frame as 2.1.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Sometimes it is easier than you think...
Just this week a developer who was building his first application with Morfik looked me up and was really eager to get me to look over his project because of some problems he was having. He had convinced himself that the trouble he was having was because he didn't really know Morfik AppsBuilder and that that was holding back his progress.
I can understand the feeling. I believe we all can as most developers have started to use a new set of tools more than once in his/her life. As it turned out, in this case, it was mostly the preconception that the problem was due to lack of specialized knowledge that was keeping him from moving forward.
Of the two problems he showed me, the first was just a simple error in the logic of the procedure he had coded. The problem was so obvious when you looked at it that he was embarrassed. (I can sympathize as I did something similar just two weeks ago.)
The second problem was indeed something that was specific to Morfik, but again, the solution was quite obvious as it was pretty much stated in the error message he was getting and on the screen where he had to check to try to understand the problem. He wanted images embedded in the database fields but had defined them as linked. Again, in this case, he wasn't really looking for the solution as he pretty much assumed that he wouldn't find it.
Sometimes you need to relax and realize that things really can be that easy.
I can understand the feeling. I believe we all can as most developers have started to use a new set of tools more than once in his/her life. As it turned out, in this case, it was mostly the preconception that the problem was due to lack of specialized knowledge that was keeping him from moving forward.
Of the two problems he showed me, the first was just a simple error in the logic of the procedure he had coded. The problem was so obvious when you looked at it that he was embarrassed. (I can sympathize as I did something similar just two weeks ago.)
The second problem was indeed something that was specific to Morfik, but again, the solution was quite obvious as it was pretty much stated in the error message he was getting and on the screen where he had to check to try to understand the problem. He wanted images embedded in the database fields but had defined them as linked. Again, in this case, he wasn't really looking for the solution as he pretty much assumed that he wouldn't find it.
Sometimes you need to relax and realize that things really can be that easy.
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