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.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
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?
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