• You can add new items by simply dragging on empty space (or Shift-dragging on events)
• You can move events by dragging (in the caption) or make them longer/shorter by dragging the bottom of the events.
• If you schedule multiple events at the same time on the same day, they will split the cell width nicely (better than Outlook, IMHO;-).
• While you are making the edits, they are sent to the server in the background for storage, without interrupting your work, in a true AJAX fashion (in demo mode after validation we throw away the changes, to make our life of keeping the demo in shape easier).
• As a future feature, I plan to combine this with my Chat demo to create a collaborative event scheduling calendar where if one party edits an event, those changes will be reflected immediately on the other parties’ screen. Will also add month view, etc.
• The architecture is so that the client side interfaces through Web Services (SOAP) with the server, so it should be simple for other applications to integrate with the Calendar (will also create a demo).
• The browser-server communication language is iCalendar, so other calendars will be able to import our events (tested manually with Google Calendar so far) and we will also be able to consume other iCalendar-compatible events.

Having almost 20 years of software development experience, of course, this does not seem such a big deed for me, still in the web space there are not that many really polished Calendars around (again, Google Calendar being a big example). Now taking into consideration the time it took me to get so far with the demo with relatively little hands-on web development experience (I was mostly envisioning/designing/managing our web projects, not coding) we can see what tools like Morfik can do with the web:

1. they can enable software engineers who avoided weakly object-oriented scripting languages thus far to create powerful solutions that can exceed their desktop equivalents in many ways and
2. they can enable small shops that were coding in MSAccess, FoxPro, Paradox, Visual Basic, etc., to become first-class, fully buzzword-compliant web developers without first learning (X)HTML, DOM, JavaScript, SOAP, XML, AJAX, Apache admin, etc. (they will eventually, IMHO, but it is not an up-front cost;-)

So in the end we can hope for more powerful and more productive web applications to come :-)

This demo was created with Morfik technology within cca. one engineer-week’s time. Some notes on features and limitations:

• The edits to the events are sent to and are validated by the server, but they are not saved in this demo (to help us maintain the demo:-)
• The demo will always show the same week (start of March, 2007) again, to help us maintain the demo.
• You cannot add all-day events in this demo.
• This started out as proof of concept to see how easy it was to develop a complex control in Morfik. You can judge it for yourself: for one week’s time it is quite polished, IMHO :-).
• We have frozen the feature set of the demo so there are many functions missing, but we are continuing the development of the Calendar control itself, so please contact us, if you need a production quality full featured solution (including back-end logic).

PLEASE NOTE: this version of the calendar is NOT secured, there are gaping holes and can be mistreated quite easily, so DO NOT use it for production purposes.