Just got note from Fuad Ta’eed of Morfik fame that they have posted two demos in the Labs with Zaptec and Dojo integration and there is more in the pipeline. This, together with Stoicho’s integration with Script.aculo.us points to a direction of which I have been great proponent for a while: Morfik has to embrace all the high quality AJAX/UI toolkits and other component sets out there and must make it very simple to use them together with Morfik’s own GUI controls and infrastructure.

Morfik is (in my view) not one technology, but rather a synergic integration of technologies with the ultimate goal of making web application development much more efficient than it is today.

There are many specialist tools on the market, some for web UIs and AJAX, others specifically for efficient browser-server communication, then frameworks for server-side operations, database access, etc., which are very professional and high quality in what they are doing but these are all separate initiatives and integrators are very few and far between. Then there are things like Ruby on Rails, J2EE, .NET, etc. that do play the integration notes with varying success. Sometimes not enough coverage, other times big complexity or prohibitive costs inhibit application for small to medium real-world problems.

That’s why creating web applications today is a challenge: you have to master many separate technologies and make sure that they work together harmoniously that puts a great burden on the developer, and instead of focusing on the business case we have to deal with low-level technical details (which is fun in itself, just a bit frustrating when deadlines loom).

Just think of this question for a moment honestly: how many times did it happen to you that you had a great plan for an application, but as the deadline approached and show-stopper technical issues arisen you had to cut-cut-cut the really valuable functionality to deliver on time/within budget? The resulting solution is OK, but far from the vision.

Morfik right now integrates the web UI, efficient browser-server communication, server-side business logic, database access, the web server and database system itself, interactive UI editing, the build process, debugging and profiling in an integrated development environment. This is already a powerful combination: all you need is to develop first-class web applications is a machine with an operating system and the Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder. Can any other tool match this simplicity? If they make sure that the platform is open and ready to absorb additional third-party technologies with ease (as it is demonstrated with the current UI toolkit integration) and consistently, then they can embrace the OSS community (some OSS-friendly steps would be welcome:-) and commercial toolkit developers too, to augment the system with additional components so that we can have the same kind of component ecosystem that makes Windows RAD so efficient.

There is still a lot to do, but the potential is there.