The Morfik Watch

We are all waiting for Morfik to unveil the next version of WebOS Apps Builder at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco starting tomorrow.

Some great new features are planned, and I can’t wait to start exploring them. For complete list of the new stuff you can check Morfik website here and AJAX Magazine coverage here. Here are my most important and intersting new features:

Serverless Web Applications

Being able to deploy Morfik projects without the need to have “deep” access to the server is something we all want. I know, many of us need database access and integration with Morfik backend server works great, but sometimes you want to just showcase something, and it was not easy, unless you have VPS hosting or managed hosting. They both are much cheaper now, but still …

Major Enhancements to Web Services

JSON, SOAP or REST. Killer

Auto-deployment to Cloud computing environment

I have been playing recently with both Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine, and I can tell you traditional hosting for Web Applications is, well, dead. Scaling, load-balancing, power on demand, off shoring system administration is the future for commercial Web Applications. I can only admire Morfik making steps in Cloud computing direction. Of course, we still have to see with are they offering

New RSS Feed Designer

Making a web form available via RSS is a must have future. I am glad we will find it in M2.

Here is a list of new futures from an email I’ve received recently from Morfik:

• Advanced Auto-Deployment with Live Update
• Serverless Web Applications
• New Visual Page Designer Theme
• Driven Interface Design
• Enhanced Control Set
• Automatic Layouts
• Auto-Creation of Data-bound Forms at Run time
• New RSS Feed Designer
• Major Enhancements to Web Services
• Language Enhancements
• Redesigned and Ultra-Modern user Interface

And from Ajax Magazine:

• Automatic Layouts
• Themes and themeable controls
• Web Actions
• Support for OpenSocial and Facebook APIs
• Synchronized browser code
• New way of calling web services
• Enhanced Web Methods
• Browser (server-less) only applications
• Web Service Data Sources
• XML data sources
• Auto-deployment to Cloud computing environment
• Automatic Data Forms
• RSS Feed designer
• Helper methods
• Enhanced compiler

Just created a Morfik search engine. It took me just 30 minutes … using Google CSE. You can see it the top of the sidebar on the right: “My Morfik Search Engine”

When I am searching something about Morfik, I usually go to 4 different places: morfik’s web site, the morfik wiki, rest of the internet, and the pdf documentation from morfik. That’s four queries, and now I think I limited the queries to just two - Morfik Forums and “My Morfik Search Engine”.

I am wondering why those Morfik forums are not indexed from the search engines? I know it’s Java Script and Ajax and the search engines have problems indexing this type of content, and I know that feature like this is irrelevant for many in house projects, but still? If Morfik can created continuous forms with the data, why not put an option on tables(or forms) so that data can be accessible from search engines in plain old html? And then the developer can decide whether to expose all the data to the search engines or not. I don’t say it is perfect solution but it is a start - may be there will be complications in multi table forms, forms from views etc. The landing pages can be html only, but with link to original content. Maybe if it was that easy it would be done until now? Hmm!

So next time when you decide to search something about Morfik, you can try “My Morfik Search Engine”. And if you think I’ve missed some site from the index, you can always tell me and I will add it (see contacts page or add the page as a comment here).

I also changed hosting providers for morfikan.com during the hollydays holidays. Moving Wordpress installation was VERY interesting experience but it is another story!

Any way: Happy New Year and … Search on

Here is the best Pre-Christmas deal you will find: for just $995 you can get the best RAD Ajax IDE available.

That’s right, Morfik is cutting the price for its IDE, which again is called Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder (it was Morfik 07 once).

I think this is great for the small Morfik community, because the previous higher prices made lots of people just not considering Morfik for their new web projects. Now this might change as many people might try it and see how great it is.

I was just wondering what happens with paying “early adopters” because of this (great) price cut?

I must have been living in some parallel universe to miss this, but the guys at Morfik have a blog I did not know about! It is here: http://blog.morfik.com/. And the posts started from 2005!

My online intelligence (which by the way means Technorati and Google Alerts) about Morfik blogs has brought me to one more Morfik blog, which unfortunately I can’t read from where I live. Either because my ISP have problems, or perhaps the blog is hosted on some location, which is blocking me from seeing it. Very strange! Anyway, the blog i can’t read: http://lnssoftware.dnsalias.net:81/blog

Two more blogs about Morfik! Great!

Here are some recent news about Morfik, because I have to start earning my blog name “The Morfik Watch”:

MorfikWiki, where you can find content and resources that are related to Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder, has put online among other things a very interesting document about Plastic Layout. If you ever heard of CanGrow, CanShring, ShrinkOnHide, VerticalPlacement, HorizontalPlacement - this is a must read.

There are quite a discussions going on at the Delphi newsgroup about Morfik. Always interesting to see different perspective!

From Morfik News Section:

Morfik has began trials of the Morfik XApps on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)

From one of my previous posts: WebOS Apps Builder Feature Request: Amazon EC2 Integration

I see here a killer feature inside the IDE: Deploy to EC2 menu!

Great!