Build Ajax-based Rich Internet Applications

March 2007

Launch of MorfikWiki

Martin Roberts has setup MorfikWiki. He has finished migrating the contents of Morfik IDE help over to the Web and now you can join in with your insights, tips and tutorials as you progress with developing your own XApp.

MorfikWiki is a portal to content and resources that are related to Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder. It aims to connect you to all the standard documentation materials such as manuals and reference guides; as well as other educational materials such as tutorials, bite-sized tips and code samples; plus technical articles. Further it will offer links to community sites and upcoming events.

It is still early days in the life of MorfikWiki, so expect it to grow and morph into something you will be visiting daily.

Now this is a Calendar!

Péter Illés has sent us a lovely Calendar XApp to be placed in Morfik Labs. This is a weekly calendar view (similar to what you can see in Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar) with drag-and-drop capability. This demo took around one week of an engineer's time. It started out as proof of concept to see how easy it was to develop a complex control in Morfik. You can judge it for yourself: for one week's time it is quite polished, he says and we at Morfik also agree :-).

He has frozen the feature set of the demo so there are many functions missing, but he is continuing the development of the Calendar control itself, so please contact him, if you need a production quality full featured solution (including back-end logic).

He says it was great fun creating this piece – and he hopes you will find great fun playing with it.

Please visit his piBlog on news about this application and on Morfik coding tips and other fun topics.

Look Mom! No JavaScript!

Morfik Labs has a number of new XApps now, including Arman’s Qooxdoo ‘like’ examples for:

– Toolbar
– Tab,
– List.

Aramn said "Qooxdoo is a very good example of win32 look and feel controls developed using a pure JavaScript framework. A Morfik Pioneer asked if Qooxdoo could be implemented in Morfik so that only a high-level language was used in its development i.e. no hand-coded JavaScript. I looked at it and saw no reason why it could not be done, so in my spare time I developed some of the controls (no, I DO have better things to do in life, but hey it is a Pioneer who asked) to show how it could be done. Hopefully, others will see that it is not difficult and will complete the rest. Have a look through the source code which is provided and if you need any help, contact me."

So you can go and develop your own controls....sky is the limit!

Bringing Ajax to Salesforce.com

Go to Morfik Labs and have a look at AjaxSalesforce. This concept XApp demonstrates what a Salesforce.com experience could truly be like, if state-of-the-art Ajax technology is used.

This application combines the classic user interface from a desktop CRM system and morphs it into a 100% Ajax user interface. It brings usability and simplicity to Salesforce.com.

It also exhibits how a Morfik project can incorporate local tables that are synchronized with Salesforce.com tables. At design time, the table structure from your Salesforce.com is imported into the project using Morfik's Service Connector Wizard, and then the contents of these tables are checked out using the Synchronization feature. This allows your users to use local and synchronized data at runtime, update it, and then commit it back to Salesforce.com whenever they wish. (This feature is disabled in this XApp). Please note, a week of development time was allocated to this project.

The Morfik Developer's Handbook Release 1

Mauricio Longo has updated the Developer’s Handbook with a major review of all the chapters. In addition, he has placed in the relevant sections of the Handbook information on what will be available in WebOS AppsBuilder Release 1.

Mauricio has also added a new chapter to cover ‘Debugging WebOS Applications’. He writes “Debugging WebOS applications is quite a bit different from debugging traditional applications, since your application is partitioned in two: server and browser sides….. When you run your application from within the Morfik IDE it determines, based on breakpoints you have set, which side it will be debugging and prepares accordingly.”

You can download the new Developer's Handbook from Morfik Library.

But this is not the end, …watch this space for new chapters and insights...

Launch of Independent Morfik Discussion Groups

Mike Kerner, a Morfik Pioneer, has taken the initiative to setup three Morfik Groups for your pleasure ….so go join in and continue developing the Morfik community:

- Morfik Tech is a group that is used to discuss technical issues revolving around Morfik.

- Morfik Tech NOT is for topics that are NOT purely technical related to Morfik.

- Morfik Pub is a place for Morfik folk to congregate to discuss issues that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Morfik - politics, hangnails, SCUBA, etc.

Morfik 07 Released With Zero-Deployment-Cost Perpetual License

Morfik today (23 Mar) announced the immediate availability of Morfik 07, its all-in-one Ajax IDE and its royalty-free perpetual license:

- FREE full and complete working version for non-commercial use.
- Startup Incubator Program: Startups can use now and pay later.
- US$5000 per developer for commercial use with significant concessions available for subscribers to Pioneers’ 07 services and educational institutions.
- ROYALTY-FREE DEPLOYMENT: One server: zero dollars. Ten-thousand servers: zero dollars.

Morfik 07, the first release of WebOS AppsBuilder, places unprecedented power in the hands of all developers. Finally, developers, regardless of their background, can build reliable, feature-rich, 100% Ajax applications without needing to even know what Ajax is. Morfik is the first development environment that combines a choice of high-level Object-Oriented languages (Java, C#, BASIC or Pascal) for the browser and server sides, offline functionality; and full support for the major browsers, databases, Windows, Linux, and on-demand services such as Salesforce.com.

“Morfik is nothing short of magic” said Vincent Gaudin, Directeur des Systèmes D'information of Mona Lisa Investment, France. “Developers who didn’t know a thing about web development are now building Ajax applications just like they used to build desktop applications”.

To read the full text please see here.

Release of WebOS AppsBuilder v0.9.17.7 with FPC as default compiler

On 4th March, WebOS AppsBuilder v0.9.17.7 was released to early testers. This release has three interesting features and functions:

- Morfik debugger has been modified to enable it to debug Free Pascal Compiler (FPC) created applications. What this means is that FPC has now replaced Virtual Pascal Compiler (VPC) as the default backend compiler for Morfik. As of this release, VPC is no longer supported.
- Implementation of a new ODBC connectivity system. Replacing the ODBCExpress connectivity with SQLDB.
- Some exciting features have been added which ensures better support for C#/Java/Basic:

We are not expecting to make this release available to all Pioneers as it is not as stable as v0.9.16.1 which is at present available for downloading. R&D internal build is currently at release level 0.9.18.1.

You want to focus your sales campaign? Have a look at the Campaign List Generator

This simple XApp in Morfik Labs shows how you could work with a local copy of the Salesforce.com tables in your Morfik project to easily create a new campaign and generate a list of members following a few simple steps in a wizard. At the end of the wizard you will be able to see the SQL statement that is automatically generated in the process.

In this project your local copy of the Campaign and Campaign Members tables (checked out from Salesforce.com using the Morfik Service connectors) are updated with new details. These updates can in turn be committed back to Salesforce.com tables (the committing of local changes is not covered in this exercise).

Please note that this is a proof of concept application and is not meant to be used as a fully functional solution, but like most examples in Morfik Labs the source code is available for you to learn from and to make use of.