Morfik - Turbo-Charged AJAX!

Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder is described as “a complete professional design tool for creating, managing and deploying dynamic Web 2.0 applications. We first wrote about it in July 2007 (see “Web Applications Without Tears”). Our main criticism at that time was its price - $5000 per developer. Morfik has now dropped the price to $995. Visit the Morfik web site at: http://www.morfik.com/.

Bitwise: First, can you explain, briefly, what Morfik WebOS is and how it related to AppsBuilder?

Besharati: We consider the Web, itself, and its supporting technology such as web servers, browsers, plug-ins, etc, to be a self sufficient operating system. You can essentially write complex and sophisticated applications that will run inside a web browser, regardless of the underlying operating system. Amazon, eBay and salesforce.com provide clear proof of that.

The AppsBuilder is a tool specifically designed to take the development of these applications to the next level, without requiring the installation of any plug-ins on the end-user’s computer.

Bitwise: What are the system requirements for AppsBuilder? Is it exclusively Windows-based? And in terms of deployment, what technologies would my web host need to provide? I mean, say I want to deploy to a Linux-based host, are there any special tools of libraries which I would need to upload in order to run WebOS applications?

Besharati: Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder is a Windows application. The applications which you create with AppsBuilder, however, can be deployed to Windows and Linux servers. In lab conditions we’ve also started to test other platforms.

Bitwise: AppsBuilder lets you program web applications using one of four syntaxes - Pascal, Basic, Java and C#. But how can this be? After all, no web browser that I’ve ever heard of understands Pascal. So what does Morfik do to get make those four languages available for programming web apps?

Besharati: Morfik has created a set of compilers which the AppsBuilder uses when you build you application. Some of the compilers generate JavaScript from the browser portion of your application and that is what will get executed in the browser at runtime. This ability to allow developers to use languages with which he is familiar, in a situation where that has never been possible before is one of the great strengths of Morfik AppsBuilder.

Bitwise: Recently Adobe open sourced its Flex and AIR SDKs. In principle, AIR sounds a lot like WebOS AppsBuilder. Are they, in fact, competing technologies?

Besharati: There is some overlap AIR and AppsBuilder, but since you can actually use Flash technology within your AppsBuilder project we consider that WebOS is a superset which includes all you can do with Adobe technology and more. You can create, for example, controls in flash or use Adobe Flex controls from your AppsBuilder project.

Bitwise: Let’s say that I want to use the development features of Morfik but display some data in a Flash-based ‘front end’. Is that possible?

Besharati: Yes, you can. You can easily build a full range of Web Services with AppsBuilder which can be called from any platform which offers support for calling standards compliant web services. It is also possible to create dynamic, purely Ajax, applications with AppsBuilder which access web services published by any standards compliant platform.

Bitwise: Can you give me some examples of the sort of application for which the application is ideally suited? Are there any ‘live’ web sites you could show me which are using AppsBuilder to good effect?

Besharati: WebOS AppsBuilder is designed for the creation of dynamic database driven applications and complex applications which can integrate distinct services and platforms. We don’t keep track of what all our users are doing with AppsBuilder but most of the projects which we have direct contact are intranet or application oriented. We know that there are, for example, several independent software vendors which are just starting to port their windows products to the Web through the use of AppsBuilder.

Bitwise: I’ve seen various references to Delphi on your web site and in your documentation. Is Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder written in Delphi? If so, why did you choose Delphi rather than, for example, C++ or C#?

Besharati: Yes, a good portion of Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder is developed with Delphi. We believe in using the best tool for each job and Delphi is an extremely powerful tool for the creation of sophisticated Win32 applications. Delphi is frequently underestimated by many, but the people who know it well will swear by.

Bitwise: Can you give me some background on WebOS AppsBuilder. Who came up with the idea in the first place and how long did it take to develop?

Besharati: The original idea came when the founders decided to create a website and, being developers themselves, just couldn’t believe that all these complex websites were done with such primitive tools as text editors which helped you along with the HTML tags and that you needed to learn so many different technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, WSDL, PHP, Java, etc) in order to do it. So, instead of simply going down that path they created the first Morfik Pascal compiler which generated JavaScript output. From then on, the concept has been built on and expanded.

Bitwise: Who do you consider to be the major competitors to AppsBuilder? CodeGear’s Delphi For PHP and Adobe’s FlexBuilder seem to offer some of the same functionality (Delphi/VB-like drag and drop page design with easy Web deployment). Do you consider those to be rival products? What would guide someone to choosing AppsBuilder rather than one of those?

Besharati: There are no direct competitors to AppsBuilder as no other tool offers all the components that Morfik brings together in the same package. You get a full featured object oriented framework and compiler for the browser and for the server sides of your applications. You also get a database and application server so that even though you can use third party database and application servers, you don’t need to.

Neither CodeGear’s or Adobe’s products cover that full range, being more limited in scope.

Bitwise: I understand that Morfik has taken out patents on some technologies. Can you explain what these patents protect and why they are necessary?

Besharati: Morfik has invested a huge number of man-hours in research and development for the creation of the compilers which allow you to write high-level language code for the browser portion of a Web application as well as in a system of dynamic positioning of content within the browser. It is this investment that we seek to protect with these patents.

Bitwise: Finally, at the moment there are a great many emerging technologies aimed at Web development (Flex 3, Silverlight, Ruby On Rails, Zend Framework etc.) . How can we be sure that AJAX isn’t just a passing phase? Surely five or ten years from now things will have moved on beyond all recognition, won’t they...? Is WebOS AppsBuilder ‘future proof’?

Besharati: Morfik as a company has been developing the technologies which comprise the WebOS AppsBuilder for the past seven years and all the sophisticated stuff that Morfik does is standards based. All technologies which become accepted and actively used web standards are being and will continue to be incorporated into the toolset that is available to the Morfik developer and not only that but it will be leveraged to propel developer productivity to even higher levels.

Just as Morfik now supports the usage of Flash and Flex, if it becomes an accepted standard, Morfik will support doing the same with Silverlight, for example.

Right now we are already working on some exciting new features which will make creating Morfik applications easier and allow for tighter integration with other platforms such as Java and .Net through the usage of web services. These will be part of the next version of AppsBuilder.