Morfik 3 and mobile development

If you haven't downloaded the beta version of Morfik 3 you should stop wasting your time.  Morfik 3 introduces a new page templates feature which let you easily create reusable layouts and basic page configurations.

This is really useful in getting started with a new project as you will be able to reuse layouts and parts of your application design that you might have already created in a previous project and saved into a template.  It is even more useful is that now that you can create pages that are specific to the iPhone and for general computers withing the same application and have the Morfik Framework automatically serve out the correct ones.  The selection is done automatically based on the device that is being used to access the application.

Morfik 3 goes into beta

Morfik has just made available for download from their website the first beta version of Morfik 3. This is the next major version of the company's flagship product and as the more recent posts to the official Morfik blog indicate it is packed with new features.

Along with the beta version the company's website has been entirely redesigned with a full corporate brand makeover including a new logo and color scheme for the product and web properties.

I'll be following up this short post with more detailed information during the day.  Right now I just wanted to make sure that everybody knew to download the beta version.

The never ending move...

It's incredible but this move is going to end up taking up a whole month, rather than a 3 days as I had anticipated.

As I was starting the process I had an issue with the new server and that alone pushed the whole process back by 3 days.  All the rest is just my self underestimating the amount of trouble and hurt it would be to merge this website and the Morfik communities currently residing in Ning.

In the past 4 or 5 months I've created and moved around several blogs a major move by iPadWatcher (www.ipadwatcher.com) and they all went very well and none lasted for more than 48 hours.

Hopefully I'll have it all sorted out soon.

Morfik Watch is moving...

The process of moving MorfikWatch to a new home has started.  Over the next 24 to 72 hours it should be complete. 

During this period there might be some moments when the website is unavailable or available with only partial content.  This period should not last long and during that time this blog's current content will be available at morfikwatch.blogspot.com.

Long absence...

I've been absent from my regular blogging about Morfik for a while now.  I have been involved with two major projects in the past three months and this has taken a toll in the number of posts I've done since February.

I'm currently preparing to move MorfikWatch to the same blogging platform as the iPadWatcher.com blog, which will make things easier for me in the next step in the evolution of this blog.

I have several plans for the near future of MorfikWatch and moving the website to a more flexible platform is a big part of them.  I really would have preferred to write the whole site from scratch in Morfik, but for now I'll settle with just getting MorfikWatch out of blogger and onto a WordPress based infrastructure that allows me much more freedom in how I can publish not only regular posts but longer and not as time constrained articles.

Stay tuned for the new MorfikWatch coming to a browser near you...

New opportunities for Morfik applications

I thought this was a good moment to discuss some interesting possibilities that are opening open for people who develop rich Internet applications without resorting to plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight.   If you have followed some of the hype that has been bubbling all over the Web about Apple's new iPad, you will be hard pressed to have missed the point that it doesn't support any such plug-ins.

In fact, the lack of Flash support has been one of the most hit on criticisms against the iPad.  Now, how is this interesting for the readers of MorfikWatch?  Well, let's consider this.  Several major websites that make use of Flash have been scrambling to get rid of it, instead of getting rid of the millions of people that are expected to get an iPad between now and the end of this year.

MorfikWatch #100 - Two new packages from Morfik

Morfik has announced in its official blog the release of two new add-on packages that are available to members of its Morfik Developer Assist Plus program.  These packages allow the user to include Amazon Ads in their applications as well as to present large sized images in a fancy HTML popup. 

This second package is based on the highly used LightBox library and adds a nice touch to applications that show thumbnails of images and then display the full picture when user clicks on the thumbnail.

As I came into MorfikWatch to post about this new release I noticed that it would be the 100th post on this blog.  I'm sure that Morfik actually released these packages just to celebrate this momentous occasion. :-)

Thanks to everyone that has been following MorfikWatch through all these posts.

Morfik auto-deployment agent available for beta testing

Morfik is making available its auto-deployment agent for beta testing.  Morfik has decided to release this agent as a product to facilitate the process of deployment to corporate servers for its users as well as to make it easier for hosting service providers to support the deployment of Morfik built applications.

This is great news to anyone that has tried out Morfik's own MorfikSpace hosting service which is still under testing.  The deployment process to the Morfik servers could hardly be easier and faster.  The availability of such a service ends up making it so easy to update an application that you may end up doing much more frequent updates than you did before.

Grab a copy from the downloads area of the Morfik website and take it for a spin.

Big packages day at Morfik: 4 new packages are available

It seems to be a big day for packages at Morfik as they have released four new packages to the subscribers of the Morfik Developer Assist program.


These packages include classes and widgets for adding AdSense, YouTube videos, Amazon S3 storage (including an uploader widget) and polished Accordion widget package.

Morfik releases several new sample applications

Morfik has just made available several new applications for download from their website. These applications provide more examples on how to use several techniques which are new to the Morfik 2.x branch such as published URLs and Links.  The following is a list of the new samples they've released:

• Morfik Reports is a cut-down version of the AjaxSMB Project. It only includes Reports and is currently downloadable as part of the Morfik Reports video in the eLearning center. 

Morfik Chat/Discussion

We are a bit late in having out chats about using external code in Morfik and I apologize to all the people that have written in interested in taking part in on of the sessions.  This has been really my fault as the past two weeks have been very frantic for me and I couldn't be sure of my own schedule.

In the next couple of days I'll be in touch with everybody, with chat schedules for different areas.  I hope we'll be able to have time which will be reasonable for everyone, regardless of the timezones.  If you are interested in joining one of the sessions and haven't emailed in yet, please do so.  

Watch out for Morfik 3.0

In a recent post in the official Morfik blog Aram Mirkazemi, Founder and CEO of Morfik, announced that the next major version of Morfik should be released in the second quarter of 2010.  While specific details aren't yet available, Aram did leave us with a general list of improvements that we can expect to see in Morfik 3.0:

• Significant improvements to widgets and packages architecture and implementation
• New controls, as well as enhancements to existing controls
• Highly-improved continuous editable forms
• Support for internationalization
• Support for animation and special graphical effects when controls change state or are moved.
• Introduction of abstract data source
• Improvements to the built-in debug browser
• General bug fixing and improvements in software stability

One area where he have already been showed a peek at what we can expect is that of controls, as some weeks ago another post  in the Morfik blog, this time by Dmitry Medvedev (who in his spare time runs Russia), showed us a menu system that would be available in a future release.  I guess that we  can be confident that it will be in version 3.0.

OpenID integration

Morfik made available yesterday to subscribers of its Morfik Developer Assist (MDA) program a new package for integrating with OpenID providers.  This enables developers to create applications which rely on the services of OpenID compatible authentication to allow access to their applications.

OpenID has been widely adopted by major websites and this should be a nice addition to the tool set of Morfik developers.

Chat/Discussion session for February 2010

It's time for another round of online chat/discussion sessions on using Morfik and this time around our invitation is in the form of a video.

If you are interested in taking part in one of the sessions, please drop me a line and don't forget to mention what timezone you are at.

Localization coming our way...

In case any of you missed it, there is a new post in the official Morfik blog which provides a peak at a localized application.  In this case its the Morfik Security Package that has been translated into several languages.

While it was not made clear what is the time frame for this feature to become available in a production release of Morfik, it is good to know that Morfik will be providing the basic infrastructure to enable easy application localization.     This is so not only because a good deal of business do have customers and users in many countries but also because there are a lot of developers using Morfik to create web based software products.

While this has never seemed to me to be special target audience for Morfik, the product does lend itself quite well for the creation of web based versions of traditional software applications with its binary back-end and browser code obfuscation.

For the developers of such software localization can be a very real requirement and having to implement it without any tool support isn't really fun. This is certainly a welcome addition to the tool set available to the Morfik developer.

Deploying Morfik apps to Amazon EC2...

In a recent blog post, Shahram Mirkazemi of Morfik gives an extensive explanation of the first steps required to deploy a Morfik application onto an Amazon EC2 instance.  In his article he uses a Fedora Core 8 base image to get the instance up and running, having chosen to deploy the application as an Apache loadable module on Linux.

It would be interesting to see this article and its follow up piece mirrored for deployment and configuration on Windows based instances.

Morfik Chats - It was good fun...

I think it was a good experience for everyone that took part in one of the Chat sessions about Morfik. It was good to get to know better some of the people I've run across in the Morfik Forums or in the Morfik community at morfikdev.ning.com.

I hope to have chat sessions with those who have already shown themselves interested in sharing a bit of their experience with other developers and that more people will join with us, in more sessions in the future.

If you missed this first opportunity but would like to participate in the future, drop me a line.  While I did have some information about interface building with Morfik to share, most sessions had great moments of general discussion about Morfik.  Please feel free to suggest topics of interest for future discussions.

Some Morfik history and background...

Yesterday a good portion of the history of Morfik was detailed in a nice blog post by Shahram Besharati, in the new Morfik Blog.  If you haven't read it yet, I recommend you do so as it provides a nice perspective on just how committed the people at Morfik are to the idea embodied in the company's product.

The power of links...

Since Morfik 2.x came out, I've had the opportunity to work on several small and one large projects using it.  I also updated a couple of my older projects from Morfik 1.x, adding some of the new effects and replacing the code previously necessary to implement them.

It was just over the past couple of weeks that I really took it upon my self to fully port an existing application to the new Links+URLs philosophy of development and interface building in Morfik 2.x. It is a very different thing to build a small application using these new features and porting an existing application.  If nothing else, the former gives us an opportunity to see how much code we're making obsolete.

I can tell you that it was a lot of code.  Even though the application was already quite tidy, employing just the essential code necessary to create the functionality an visual effects I wanted for a basic content management system.  A basic application to run a website with variable content, without requiring the application to be recompiled.

In an application with some 12 to 15 Forms combining the use of styles, URLs and Links I was able to remove some 90% of the code related to the interface.  That was some 300 to 400 lines of code.  All made superfluous by publishing some URLs and then setting the Link property for the right controls.

This experience gave me a much better feel for just how useful these new features as it made me really appreciate how much effort they save me.  If you haven't taken the time to explore URLs and Links, I certainly recommend you do so.

A menu control finally coming to a Morfik near you?!

A new post that appeared today on the new Morfik blog showcases a menu system that is being developed for the next major version of Morfik.  The lack of an actual menu control has long been one of the most criticized  Morfik "features", even though it is already possible to build decent menus using the dropdown control.

In fact, Dmitry describes in general terms how the menus are implemented and the dropdown control seems to play a major role in it.  Though we can't try it out yet, as a sample of pre-pre-release control/system I would say that this one gets an A. :-)

On-line discussion sessions

I was amazed by the response to my invitation to share some experiences through an on-line session/discussion.  I'll wait a couple more days for any stragglers and then I'll be getting in touch with everyone that showed interest in participating so that we can setup these discussions in away that the time of day is reasonable to all involved.  :-)  Being part of a community with members from all around the globe certainly is nice, but it does have its drawbacks, timezone differences being one of the biggest I can think off.

Morfik blogs on the move...

If you missed this so far, you might want to look into Morfik's new blog website.  It seems that the people at Morfik will be posting with some regularity, as there have been four posts since the start of the year.

This means that the Morfik community will have another channel of communication with Morfik developers and if it should be a really good thing if they do really get into writing.  If you haven't checked the blog out yet, please do so and cheer them on so that we can have more information, sooner about what they are up to.

Gather around the Morfik water cooler...

As we start a new year, I feel we should try out new things.  MorfikWatch has been up and running for over a year now, and I'd like to make the interaction between the blog and its readers more dynamic and foster more direct interaction among Morfik users.

To start this out I was thinking of doing a voice and screen presentation/discussion about the design features of Morfik, aka "how to make your application look good". :-)

If you are interested participating, please let me know by sending me a message.  It would be important to know where you are, specially what timezone as readership seems to be pretty much scattered all over the planet.

UPDATE: I had some problems when I created this email account on gMail and it is was not working properly.  This is solved now and the account seems to be working okay. As soon as I noticed this I pulled the article from the blog.  Sorry for the inconvenience of any returned emails.

We can call this the modern day version of  the conversation around the water cooler.

I'm looking at the possibility of setting up other on-line sessions with other presenters, covering a variety of  topics about Morfik development, deployment, hosting, etc...   Have you got any interesting ideas or suggestions?