Morfik

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Morfik Technology Pty Ltd.
Type
Founded	Hobart, Tasmania, AUS (1999)
Headquarters	Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Key people	Aram Mirkazemi, Co-founder Shahram Besharati, Co-founder
Industry	Computer software
Products	WebOS AppsBuilder 1, Morfik Express 2.0, Morfik WebOS 2.0
Website	http://www.Morfik.com

Morfik Technology Pty Ltd., an Australian company, is the developer of WebOS AppsBuilder, an Integrated development environment (IDE) aimed at developing Ajax applications in a high-level language such as Java, C#, BASIC or Object Pascal^[1]. Morfik includes visual design tools for forms, database structure, and queries. It supports the classic client-server model, however like all Ajax applications, the client-side code runs in a browser. The Morfik development tool converts the forms that the user draws into DHTML, compiles the client-logic into JavaScript, and builds the application and database server engines to house the server-side code.

Contents 1 Company History 2 WebOS AppsBuilder Features 3 Morfik Innovations 4 Compilers 5 Criticisms 6 Morfik Applications Gallery 7 In the Media 8 Primary websites 9 References

[edit] Company History

Morfik Technology is a privately-funded company that was founded in 1999 in Hobart, Tasmania by Aram Mirkazemi and Shahram Besharati. For a brief time, it was located in Sydney, New South Wales.

In September 2005, it demonstrated a pre-beta version of its flagship product, WebOS AppsBuilder at the Web 2.0 Conference.^[2] Morfik was a major sponsor of this conference ^[3]. Rumours spread just prior to the conference that Robert Scoble, Microsoft's lead evangelist, thought that Microsoft should buy Morfik, however, this was quickly laid to rest by Scoble himself. At the conference, Morfik showed how web applications could be designed for both online as well as offline use, via its 'Unplugged' vision, by demonstrating an 'unplugged' version of Google's Gmail that could function offline.

Two months later, the SD Times writes "Morfik IDE Simplifies AJAX Development" and the first version of the WebOS AppsBuilder was released for public evaluation and testing. This was followed by the opening in February 2006, of Morfik Labs which was designed to showcase Ajax applications that were created using WebOS AppsBuilder.

March, 2006, marked the first time WebOS AppsBuilder was presented at a conference presenation, when Paul Ruizendaal, Managing Director of Janus Software presented a review of WebOS AppsBuilder at Software Development GigaCon, Poland.

A month later, Morfik Chess was made available on Morfik Labs. Although a few other browser-based Chess games had already been released (the most notable by Douglas Bagnall), Morfik's was the first that allowed both single and multi-player modes. Further, the single-player mode utilized one of the first Javascript-powered chess engines that could calculate moves beyond 3-ply.

In May, 2006, Google released Google Web Toolkit. Due to the significant similarity to Morfik's JavaScript Synthesis Technology, significant media and blogsphere discussion commenced as commentators debated the possible relationships and partnerships between Morfik and Google. GWT's manager, Bret Taylor offered a direct responseto the technology issue, by saying that GWT did not use any Morfik technology. The debate extended to patent rights and potential lawsuits (for example, Newswire and ZDNet). Initially, various critics including PathFinder questioned whether any actual patent applications had been filed, but these criticism were laid to rest when at least one of Morfik's patent applications was made publicly available by the USPTO itself. ^[4]

In August, 2006, A review of AppsBuilder in the context of developing web applications solely in C# appeared in a the magazine DEV.

The first Professional License for Morfik WebOS was by acquired by Greenpeace International in October, 2006, and two months later, [Altium] deployed the first commercial application built with WebOS AppsBuilder. It was a mashup with Salesforce.com applications which permitted a hierarchical view of all projects managed through Salesforce.com.

In March 2007, v1.0 was officially released ^[5] and its name was changed to "Morfik 07"). See also here

[edit] WebOS AppsBuilder Features

WebOS AppsBuilder (Morfik 07) has the following features:

• High-level language programming (Object Pascal, C#, Basic and Java) for both server and browser sides of the application.
• Combination of Dynamic and Exact positioning of elements in a web page, achieved by in-browser runtime adjustments.
• Allows web applications to be run on a desktop computer as a local application.
• Full featured object-oriented development framework usable from all the supported programming languages.
• Visual Rapid Application Development Environment: create forms, reports, query, tables and table relationships via Visual builder.
• Services connectivity : Support for Amazon S3 storage for the Internet, other on-demand services such as Salesforce.com and integration with Mail services using IMAP, SMTP and POP3;
• High-level source Debugging: debug errors in browser and server side code from within IDE. Either debug at the high-level source code level or at the automatically generated JavaScript code-level. Add breakpoint to pause execution, and view current variable values via mouse hovers. Track all SQL, XML and HTTP activity.
• Multi-platform Support: Deploys on Windows or Linux platforms(Fedora Core 4, SuSE 10.1, Debian 3.1 targets).
• Fully integrates all the components required to build a web-based application into a single package, including a Firebird database and an Apache web server.

[edit] Morfik Innovations

• JavaScript Synthesis Technology (JST) : Morfik's patent-pending compiler technology ^[4] that compiles code written in dialects of high-level languages such as Pascal, Basic, Java or C# into HTML and JavaScript, for the purpose of running applications written in those languages natively within a Web Browser. This automatically generated JavaScript can be complemented with custom in-line JavaScript or by linking-in external handwritten JavaScript code libraries.
• Elastic Page Design: (also patent-pending ^[6] ) enables developers to design complex web interfaces that allow parts of the web page to dynamically adjust their size to suit their content at run-time (fluid layout), whilst maintaining all design-time constraints (fixed layout).
• Unplugged Applications: first showcased at the Web 2.0 Conference in 2005, with an unplugged version of Gmail, Google's AJAX-based mail client. Intended to show that with Morfik AppsBuilder you could create web applications that functioned both online as well as offline.^[7]
• High-level source Debugging : Debug errors in browser and server side code from within IDE. Either debug at the high-level source code level or at the automatically generated JavaScript code-level. Add breakpoint to pause execution, and view current variable values via mouse hovers. Track all SQL, XML and HTTP activity.

[edit] Compilers

Morfik has done extensive work in the area of compilers. This includes developing compilers for the purpose of developing web applications, that receive code in one of the following language syntax: C#, Basic, Object Pascal and Java, and output either JavaScript or Object Pascal depending on whether the target of each module was for the browser or server side of a Morfik Application, respectively.

• This was made only made possible through the development of eight different compilers
  • For the Browser: Four of the compilers take a high-level programming language (C#, Basic, Object Pascal or Java) and output browser-side JavaScript code. This output includes code that conforms to the ECMA Script standards (the core set of language elements, such as operators, control structures and statements) as well as objects to control a browser and its Document Object Model (DOM).The compiler then optimizes the JavaScript footprint through obfuscation, smart-linking and incremental downloads.
  • For the Server: The other four compilers take the above same four high-level languages and output Object Pascal code.
• Finally the Object Pascal code is compiled, using a customized version of Free Pascal, to binary form and the JavaScript packaged into a single resource for deployment

[edit] Criticisms

• Missing critical features: their site (which was built with their product) lacks some of the technological features that have become standard for Web 2.0 sites and companies. These include:
  • CSS: AppsBuilder currently does not allow developers to base their presentation layer on CSS templates. Developers, can however, use inline CSS and access all the standard DOM objects and methods.
  • Syndication and aggregation of data in RSS/Atom: no built-in support for RSS
  • Clean and meaningful URLs: Implementation of bookmarks is via URLs that are long and not human readable
• Aimed at software developers not web developers: Some say that Morfik's emphasis on coding in an object-oriented language such as Java or C# instead of directly coding in JavaScript significantly under-utilizes the skills and knowledge of existing web developers, the vast majority of whom are far more skilled in CSS, HTML and JavaScript then in Java.
• Unorthodox method of deployment for web applications: Creating web applications in a manner that is akin to win32 applications, (for example, if deploying onto a Windows-based server, the web application is output as a .exe file. This makes it hard for many businesses to use their existing web hosting packages to host a Morfik-created web application.
• Is search-engine unfriendly: Like most database-driven rich internet web applications, a Morfik application is not optimized for search-engines.

[edit] Morfik Applications Gallery

In addition to Morfik's own web site www.morfik.com, being created using AppsBuilder, Morfik Labs showcases many of the other applications that have been written with AppsBuilder: including

• Morfik Chess: Allows users to play each other online or play against a chess engine. This is the first known instance of a chess engine that resides in the browser that is capable of more than 3-ply. This received notable attention from the blogosphere by ZDNet,Ajaxian, and Pathfinder.
• Desktop Gmail
• Google Maps Mashup
• Salesforce.com synchronization

[edit] In the Media

Morfik has featured in a diverse range of media including SDTimes,^[8] The Interbase & Firebird Developer Magazine, FYRACLE, ^[9] AustralianIT, ^[10] Dev: La rivista che ti insegna a programmare ^[11] and Toolbox ^[12] as well as on notable web sites including Slashdot (1, 2, 3), ComputerWorld, Read/WriteWeb (1, 2), Jason Kottke, Ajaxian, and Pathfinder (1, 2, 3).

[edit] Primary websites

• Morfik Technology Pty Ltd.
• Morfik Labs
• Morfik Wiki

[edit] References