Yes! Morfik 2.0 is out at last! After a very long hiatus (the last true “beta” was released sometime early summer) the new Morfik 2.0 Web Application Builder is out.

I’m (quite:-) closely following the Morfik saga since late 2005 and did have many long discussions with Aram, Fuad, Mauricio and Shah about direction in the past three years, sometimes pretty heated chats about the vision and execution, so I’m not an unanimous supporter of everything Morfik, but version 2 is a very significant step in the good direction.

The new visual design concept with themes, states, popup customization, etc. is a major step forward for web application design. I see real innovation here.  Go and check out the tutorial videos, it is worthwhile! I wouldn’t say that I’m fond of the sixties look of the new demo apps (and of the new Morfik site itself), but the design flexibility is impressive and the functionality seems to be very well thought out.

I’ll be looking into the new version in the coming days and weeks (we do have some projects that now will have to be ported anyway, especially our PMAP controls and libraries), so stay tuned for new comments to come.

The web is abuzz today with Google’s entrance to the web browser war-field with its shiny new Chrome beta. You’ll find plenty of coverage elsewhere (Google’s blog is here, the comic strip (more about it later) starts here), I’d only like to focus on one conspiracy theory aspect: the first version of Google OS.

First of all, do read the comic strip by Scott McCloud and the Chrome Team. It is in itself a piece of marketing art and although its primary intended audience may be journalists and less technical people, it is a statement of how serious Google is about Chrome and full of hints for conspiracy theorists among us.

So some of my first thoughts will follow…

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./ just reported that the USPTO granted Morfik a patent for JST (JavaScript Synthesis Technology). The patent covers the synthesis of JavaScript virtually from any high-level language, including “Ada, C, C++, C#, COBOL, ColdFusion, Common Lisp, Delphi, Fortran,
Java, Object Pascal, SmallTalk, Visual Basic, and Visual Basic.NET“.

It will be interesting to see how this will affect GWT and some other similar toolkits. The Morfik technology behind the patent is in development for quite some time (since around 2000, AFAIK), but many will try to find “prior art”, a lot of them unfortunately without reading the patent itself.

I will be doing an in-depth technical review of the patent (as soon as I get a legitimate copy) from a Morfik developer perspective, so stay tuned…

Hatem @ AJAX Magazine wrote a very good primer on Morfik architecture — a good read for anyone.

Dan Webb has some important thoughts about the Flash v.s. Ajax debate and the comments on his site and on the Ajaxian site are also thought provoking.

Indeed it is anyone’s guess how WPF/E, Flash/Flex/OpenLaszlo, AJAX (Backbase, YUI, Dojo, Prototype, Qooxdoo,…), GWT, Eclipse/RAP and Morfik will mature but this year will be definitely very interesting for web application development!

Code Gear just announced two new products: Delphi 2007 for Win32 and Delphi for PHP.

A quick rundown on each:

• Delphi 2007 for Win32 is the latest release of good old Delphi with improved Vista and AJAX support (in the form of VCL for AJAX).
• Delphi for PHP is a RAD IDE and component set for PHP developers. This may be a BIG hit: it packs a powerful IDE with an architecture/component framework called VCL for PHP and adds on top of that professional debugging support and deployment wizardry. I will definitely have more first-hand news about this baby in the coming weeks.

It should be noted that Delphi for PHP is not strictly a CodeGear/Borland internal project, it is originated from qadram’s qstudio, but now it is developed together by the two companies. VCL for PHP used to be called WCL and as far as I see will remain open source.

You can read more here (a very good blog, BTW).

If you seem a little bewildered by all the Delphi for Xxxx (e.g. Delphi for PHP has nothing to do with Object Pascal) and VCL for Yyyy tags, don’t feel lost! It is just POBC (plain old brand capitalization) .

While I am at it PasWiki seems to be interesting, too: it is a simple Wiki engine written in “Modern Pascal”. The angle I am keen to learn more about is its performance claims, an important subject and an area where Morfik should shine.

I just wrote yesterday about the issue of AJAX apps being a challenge for searches and how one could go about fixing it, and today’s news are around sitemaps.org created by no others than Goolge and Yahoo! (with Microsoft’s support):

“Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.” (sitemaps.org)

Their solution does not in itself solve the AJAX problem but can augment my proposal quite nicely ;-).

Google Search and other similar crawlers have a difficult time with AJAX applications: they were tuned for full-page-load style traditional web content and don’t adapt well for single-page web applications, where many times there are no well identified URLs for different content and getting to content in the first place is trickier than following a few links (did I mention Flash-based apps?). And still, for most of these sites getting into searches (i.e. exposure) is essential.

ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol) is a new initiative from the international publishing community to turn the challenges facing the industry from web technologies (especially search) into opportunities in a win-win way, and as a side effect can help Web Applications out, too.

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The WHATWG Web Applications 1.0 specification is an initiative by browser vendors (Opera and Mozilla seems to be included) and other parties to create the next generation of web application XHTML.

Notable items are: the context menus, a direct-mode graphics canvas, inline popup windows, and server-sent
events.

The latter is especially interesting for load/performance considerations: fundamentally all web applications have to maintain a channel to the server to learn about events that are important for the user (think of a chat app, for example). At the moment this is done by the client (browser) periodically polling the server, which is a recurring load for the server (it happens even if you are not doing anything). The server-sent events technology promises to turn this into server-push: the clients will not have to poll, and the server will rather push the information to clients that are interested.

Opera seems to be the first to implement the technology in the 9.0 browser. It seems Opera is working hard to become the darling of web applications developers: first their rendering and editing improvements, and now this starts to make Opera a very compelling platform for web apps.

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.
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Google has embraced Morfik technology full-heartedly:

“Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java development framework that lets you escape the matrix of technologies that make writing AJAX applications so difficult and error prone. With GWT, you can develop and debug AJAX applications in the Java language using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler to translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.”

It must be a superb moment for the Morfik team to see that one of the biggest players in the software industry found Morfik’s technology very valuable and decided it was an important piece of its own AJAX software portfolio (and probably a basis of their own WebOS?).

I am really interested in how this develops!