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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Joel in his Strategy Letter IV has to say the following about the future of web applications:

What’s going to happen? The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “native” code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compiler writers obsess about performance so you don’t have to. It’ll have all the same performance as native JavaScript with full access to the DOM in a consistent fashion, and it’ll compile down to IE native and Firefox native portably and automatically. And, yes, it’ll go into your CSS and muck around with it in some frightening but provably-correct way so you never have to think about CSS incompatibilities ever again. Ever. Oh joyous day that will be.

Good to see that other visionaries have the same vision, too :-)

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!

Just a quick, semi-compulsory blurb: Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder has reached the Release 1 state and the new version is now officially called Morfik 07!

I won’t repeat the press release at the MorfikWiki site. What’s important, though:

• Morfik has improved tremendously in the last two months;
• stability is much better;
• the Framework is streamlined and got rid of some fat (more about this later);
• there is now good documentation in the form of the Developer’s Guide by Mauricio Longo (excellent, even I could learn a few new things;-) and the MorfikWiki site (that contains some of my tips and overall will be a perfect platform for documentation).

Stoicho just released a blurb at his “The Morfik Watch” blog about the release and he is also amused by the name (Morfik 07) and how close it is to 007: IMHO it would have been more appropriate, considering the disruptive lethalness of the new technology to the current, stone-age way of developing web applications :-)

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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Ed has a wonderful site listing some of the most popular Web 2.0 games offered on the web, and also a Top 10 List.

Fortunately, Pong and Sweeper have made onto the list, but they need some promoting to get into the top ten, so do not hesitate!

Ed has some good ideas on Pong and Sweeper features that I should add ASAP.

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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