AJAX Magazine: Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder Review

Published on 2007-02-07 21:37:28

Project Management

Morfik is a complete development environment, the first interface of the IDE shows the recent projects, in addition to the shortcuts for creating a new project, opening an existent one, and help on most important topics.

You can create a new project using the wizards in Express, Intermediate or Advanced Mode. In intermediate mode you'll have the choice between creating WebOS AppsBuilder project or Scriptor project. Then you'll have the choice of the storage model you want for your sources as embedded files in the main project file, or as individual files which are referenced by the main project file which is more suitable for large projects where more developers need to access sources via SVN, CVS or other. You can always convert from an option to another using the "Convert project" option.

Finally you can choose from the supported syntaxes Basic, Pascal, C# or Java, and set the encoding of your project whatever Unicode, ISO or other. Advanced mode differentiate only by the possibility to choose your target platform Windows or Linux; this also can be always changed from the project's options.

Morfik IDE open by default in design mode as you can see in the screenshot below, and as you can see there is two ways to explore the different options in your project. The sidebar option is very useful during coding, while you'll need only the main window for visual creations, edits, previews ... etc.

Programming with Morfik

Coding with Morfik AppsBuilder is powered by a bunch of features that you should find in a modern IDE:

Code folding: to collapse and expand sections of code

Code Navigation: to easily navigate through your code using hyperlinks

Identifier and highlighting occurrences: Code editor supports identifier and code block highlighting

Code completition with Morfik Doc

Immediate Morfik Doc help

Morfik Doc comments auto-spell

Server-side and client side debugging

Debugging assistance

Profiling

The features are very well accessible, and I got the reflex to hit F1 with a method I don't know and it will opened automatically the WHM help file in the topic I was looking for.

What is interesting here for developer is how to write code for browser? The answer is in Morfik Events handling, you'll find in the properties window in the sidebar list of available events related to every page and every component. There is a list of browser and server events, many are very common such OnClick, OnBlur, OnKeyDown, OnKeyUp ... and others that you'll discover with Morfik such OnAfterDataChange, OnAfterDBNavigate, OnReadHistory, OnWriteHistory ... This give you more control on your web applications, and of course the available events change from a component to another.

Something I noticed in almost all demo projects that sometimes there is nothing to do at all in the server-side code, all coding in the browser-side option and this is one of the key points in my opinion that makes Morfik AppsBuilder more powerful and able to support multi-platforms more easily.

Debugging Client-Side, Server-Side

Debugging have been made fun with Morfik for both client and server side. You can already access from Morfik IDE to the generated JavaScript, in addition to the intermediate source, until the Assembler instructions in the CPU. You can create breakpoints and set conditions, pass count, log expression if you set the log option, thread ID and the type: execute, byte write, byte read/write, word write ...

Since Morfik still in beta it's important to notice that browser debugging is still temperamental, but I'm sure for Firefox users that everybody have Firebug installed ?

Overall you have a set of tools in the bottom that you can toggle to view different debug information and message from HTTP request, SQL queries, XML code exchanged via SOAP, ... From debug menu options are set by default to automatic, there is more options for evaluation timeout, tooltip expression delay, intermediate source debugging. You can check also the available exceptions, or monitor more SQL information.

Profiling With Morfik

Beside the debugging tools, you can find the Morfik profiler which is very important to optimize your code. Both server and browser side profiling is available in Morfik AppsBuilder. Timer can be set using StartTimer() and StopTimer() , and you can define the monitors you want to detect any performance lack in your code.

The profiler display in a tree view the different time recorded for resources, server and browser. This gives an excellent idea on the application performance, and from where you should start optimizing.

Scriptor

Finally and before closing the part three of this review I just wanted to point to a key point in Morfik technology. Scriptor, which allows the building of special JavaScript snippets to enhance the AJAX experience of a web-based application, is in the core of Morfik's technology, it is the Morfik's equivalent of Google's GWT. Many compare Morfik to GWT, what they are really comparing is just the Scriptor function of Morfik to GWT and not the IDE and other features.

Morfik Performance

We didn't had time at all to make performance test on Morfik Apps but "Morfik.com, which is a Morfik application and run on a basic server was slashdotted twice and it had very little effect on it at all", said Fuad Ta'eed, Morfik's Pioneers Program Coordinator.

"The reason is that the server side code is highly concurrent while the browser side code is completely asynchronous. It is important to emphasis that Morfik applications are 100% AJAX. This has many positive consequences, but Morfik applications do not have the downside of many frameworks which claim to be AJAX but are really 'AJAX like' in that they are basically code snippets and canned code."

Conclusion

So in three parts, we tried to touch most important features in the new Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder. Something that really couldn't be done in one post, and there is still many things that we didn't talk about in detail (expect a part 4 and 5 :)).

Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder is the new generation of IDE that use the power of the browser to help developers create killer AJAX applications in the language of their choice. Tomorrow we'll see a tutorial on how to create a simple application in Morfik, I thought this will give you a better idea on using the IDE.

I would like to thanks the Morfik team for giving AJAX Magazine the scoop, I'm not sure but I think we were the first to flirt with Morfik 0.9.16.1 last week before its public release and we tried to give you in glance everything new about this new technology.

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