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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Finally it is up & running! Our GanttProto demo application is up on appspot.com. My goal was to see how such a complex visual control can be done in the browser after one developer told me that it was impossible :-) I did have a suspicion that it is doable, based on my experience with the Calendar control, but you never know… :-) At the same token it is also a good test-case for our PMAP Grid control (coming in another announcement soon).

Read on for technical details…

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Here is our first PMAP control: the Tree View. Please look at the demo in Morfik Labs (as soon as it is up) (it is uploaded!).

Our new Tree View will allow you to build trees of virtually any complexity, even containing HTML and the ability to command other parts of your user interface. It has been optimized to keep its performance sustained even with large trees. The PMAP code set contains both the full source code of the tree control and the continuously growing infrastructure functions we are using to build high performance controls and applications.

Some highlights:

• Full keyboard navigation.
• Multiple levels of customizability (style sheet, properties, events, etc.).
• Any tree node can contain valid HTML.
• Build the tree either through the control API, or with the help of XML or JSON.
• Performance optimized.
• Multiple selection support (with keyboard navigation, too!).
• Fixed height or elastic sizing based on content.
• Dynamic loading API for huge trees.

A few words about the demo:

• The default tree demonstrates a few things, like embedded hyperlinks, user interface commanding (will turn the pages in the Tab control in an event handler), and various icons.
• You can edit this tree or create your own in many ways
  • by building it up node-by-node,
  • by adding complete sub-trees defined in JSON format,
  • by specifying the entire tree in XML or JSON format, or
  • by generating a tree based on some parameters.
• You will notice that using the JSON interface is much faster than the XML interface. This is indeed a good comparison of the JSON v.s. XML support of your browser (see the Log for timing data).
• You will be able to customize many of the node and tree options.
• How to use the Items page:
  • First press “Set Items (XML)” (and be patient;-: it will set up a test tree that is in the editor on the right in XML format.
  • Then press “Get Items (JSON)”: the editor will be filled with the JSON version of the same tree.
  • Careful: press “Clear” below the tree control, to make the tree empty (it is lovely to have so many Clear buttons:-).
  • Now press “Set Items (JSON)”: your tree will be re-built much faster (just look at the log, on some configurations the difference can be 50 fold+!).
  • If you want to get back the original tree, just press “Default content”.

Feel free to play with the control and let us know of your findings (either by commenting here or by dropping a mail).

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 :-)

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!

Richard MacManus has an interesting article about “WebOS market review” on his blog on ZDNet. Beyond GoogleOS he mentions several WebOS initiatives (XIN, YouOS, EyeOS, Orca, Goowy, Fold). To my surprise Morfik is not in the list! His article has also been Slashdotted and the comments on both sites are interesting:  most readers are confused about what WebOS is at all and whether it has any future. This is quite normal as we are at the very begining of the WebOS era but also indicates that some educational efforts should be in order form the WebOS vendor companies and from us “visionaries” :-). And of course, one or two killer apps that would establish the market and would make front page news…