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

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

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

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.