AJAX Magazine: Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder Review

Published on 2007-02-06 10:01:19

The bottom tabs of the Morfik page designer give you the possibility to switch from visual editor, browser code and server code. Of course as we have mentioned before that code will be written in the language of your choice C#, Basic, Pascal or Java, but you don't have to write any JavaScript at all, Morfik will generate everything for you.

Visual designer provide automatic alignment and distancing features, in addition to full control of different properties of each component. From the properties window you can control both server side and browser side events which can be naturally assigned to the event handlers.

And to make Morfik designer more personalized, you can create your own custom controls and add them to the IDE. This is great to boost development of complex application using highly customized components.

Morfik Report Designer

From Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder you can easily create reports for viewing and printing in PDF format. The reports designer tool is similar to the form designer but without the interactive components, since interaction isn't required here. Report's canvas corresponds with a single sheet of paper A4 or US Letter that you can personalize and print.

Reports have also two sets of headers and footers, the report header and the page header, the same thing for footers. This gives you the ability to set a first page header, and a header for the entire document. Printing reports is one of the very common tasks in administrations, for e-Gov for example I used to print reports with almost every task so this will be great to have such tool.

SalesForce Integration

The integration of Salesforce in Morfik IDE has been boosted to a very high level not only with Service Connectors which allow using SalesForce as a remote database, but also with the predefined support for Salesforce.com S-Control Objects. From the project menu, then Service connectors you can choose Salesforce CRM Services WSDL, and after entering your Salesforce username and password you can have direct access to the remote objects.

Certainly wizards make this integration pretty easy, and as usual you don't have to write any JavaScript at all since S-Control Objects are supported by Morfik. Maybe this is a very specific feature for SalesForce CRM community, but I find it excellent for any custom Salesforce based development.

WebServices and Mashups

We talked a lot about AJAX and webservices and how it's changing the way we conceive web applications. That's why Morfik offers the ability to consume and publish web services, with automatic creation of a WSDL file generated for every XApp. Create your business logic and Morfik will do the rest for you, nothing easier in my opinion. Turn the "Published metadata attribute" to true be enough to make your web methods available for external consumption, the WSDL will be generated within the executable.

This was the WebServices creation process, to consume external webservices in your application simply import the WSDL from the menu "projects, import web service tools", and you'll have all the external methods available in the IDE with their parameters. Morfik IDE generates here a module with the classes required to call the imported methods in as easy a manner as possible.

Overall you have all the necessary to create killer Mashups with only few clicks and just few coding. I have find myself playing with some webservices and writing simple mashup application in Pascal, very easy for desktop applications developers and even for web developers with some knowledge of Pascal, Java, C# or Basic.

Conclusion

In part one and two we covered almost all RAD tools offered by the latest Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder. Now that is publicly available you can download your copy and give it a try. In next part we'll continue looking inside Morfik IDE and we'll talk more about Programming with Morfik, Debugging, Profiling, project management ... etc.

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