Morfik 2.1 Update

Just a bit over 15 minutes ago Aram Mirkazemi, Morfik's CEO, wrote a post on the General Discussions forum of the company's website, indicating that the new release is likely to be released by mid next week.

While I know that many where anxiously awaiting a release today, a few more days shouldn't make that much of a difference, specially if they translate into a release which has been thoroughly tested. Hopefully, this time next week everyone will have had a chance to experiment a bit with AppsBuilder 2.1 and will be reading more about it, right here at MorfikWatch.

Morfik AppsBuilder 2.1 is coming...

Most users of Morfik AppsBuilder should by now be aware that a new release is expected soon. Version 2.1 promises to be feature packed with lots of interesting new options and capabilities. As soon as version 2.1 is released, I'll be writing and posting to MorfikWatch a series of article, covering the new features that were introduced in this version.

These articles are intended to be a general description of how to use the new features, for those who are not yet full time Morfik developers or just coming into the Morfik world. Experienced users who use Morfik in their day-to-day work should have little difficulty in finding out about the new features by themselves but may also save some time by going through these articles first.

A Morfik wish list

While chatting with a friend, a few minutes ago, I started making up a small Morfik wish list. These are a few things I miss in the current version of AppsBuilder and that I have not seen mentioned in the list of things expected to be available for the 2.1 release. It occurred to me that if I don't tell people about them, the chance of one of one of them ever finding its way to a future release of AppsBuilder was slim at best.

So, here we go...

1. Spell checking for the text in TextLabels. Ideally this would be visible in form design mode, but I would settle for having it work in the dialog box where you enter the text for the caption property.
2. The ability to bind any property to a database field. For example, binding the Visible property of a control to a boolean (true/false) field.
3. A visual way to design page navigation for the application, which would automatically generate navigation menus. I remember that this was in my wish list for 1.0, but I'm sure it was too soon for it back then. Now that Morfik AppsBuilder is a more mature product with a much more sophisticated IDE, the time could be right for something like this.
4. Easy integration with Google Analytics. This is a great and free tool for following the access patterns to your website.
5. Explicit support for database stored procedures. Stored procedures are great for accomplishing any number of tasks, including data retrieval and while it is possible to use them through pass-through queries it would be enormously helpful if we could see the available stored procedures in the current database in the Morfik Project View and choose one of them as a data source for Form.
6. Input field masks, formatting and data validation. Having tool support for handling data input is validation, while not critical websites which have few input Forms, is critically important for business applications.

I'll stop at this point. Having an active imagination I could go on forever. These are some of the more important things (apart from the visual navigation which would just be nice to have), which I did not see mentioned in the list of improvements that we can expect for the 2.1 release.

Does anyone else have any other "practical" suggestions for the future?

Morfik Developers Day in Brazil

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.

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.