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?