OK, here goes. This damn’ thing is stunning. Over the past few months I’ve been trying to work up some enthusiasm for CodeGear’s Delphi For PHP, a visual design tool for creating web applications. As a long-time Delphi user (I wrote the monthly Delphi column for PC Plus magazine for over ten years) I was expecting to get up, running and enthusiastic about Delphi For PHP (DPHP) in next to no time. So far that still hasn’t happened. The fact that the DPHP editor is pretty poor (not even any code collapsing) and that there is next to no documentation or help system worthy of the name hasn’t exactly helped.

Overall, I have ended up with the feeling that Delphi For PHP is a rushed release - acquired from its original developers, Qadram (who had previously announced that they would release it as free software), and far too rapidly pushed out onto the market. Moreover, as I’ve said before, its name is, in my opinion, wholly misplaced: whether you consider Delphi to be the name of an IDE or of a language (Borland/CodeGear keeps changing its mind on that subject), Delphi For PHP has neither the IDE nor the language (Object Pascal) which I wrote about for those ten years as a Delphi columnist...

Morfik’s WebOS AppsBuilder, by contrast, is far more Delphi-like than Delphi For PHP (actually, the developers claim that the IDE was based on Microsoft Access - though it was at least partially written in Delphi). It has a superior editor, an excellent drag-and-drop form designer - heck, it even lets me program applications in Object Pascal. This, in short, is precisely the sort of product I would have expected from CodeGear. Apart from the product name, anyhow. Delphi is a nice name, a short name, a memorable name - Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder isn’t. From now on, therefore, I shall refer to this product simply as Morfik. This, I should point out, is entirely incorrect as ‘Morfik’ is the name of the company, not the product. All the same, its PDF manual regularly refers to the software as ‘Morfik’, so I’ll do so too.

Incidentally, for those benighted souls who have never used Delphi, I should make it clear that it isn’t obligatory to program Morfik in Pascal; C#, Basic and Java are also available as options. The software has some clever stuff going on behind the scenes to transform, your code into something that can be run either on the web or on the desktop. The manual (a very good one, incidentally) describes the process thus:

[Morfik] generate(s) intermediate code in a high level language, Object Pascal, and it then goes into a second compilation step turning this into machine specific assembly code. This code is then linked with some of the core code for the Apache web server thus becoming, at once, a web and application server in a single entity.

I’m not at all sure how it does this. Anyhow, whatever it does, it seems to work, which, frankly, is all that really matters.

Morfik has a form designer, a report designer, a visual query designer (as in Access you can draw lines between field names to create relationships thereby avoiding the horrors of hand-coded SQL) and it has a pretty decent code editor and debugger.

Three Steps To A Web Application

 1. Drag, drop, align and configure some controls in the design workplace...

 2. Write program code in a language of your choice - here Pascal...

 3. Click to run and test it in a web browser.

All in all, Morfik is a pleasure to use. So where’s the catch? Ah yes, there is one. It’s the price. Weighing in at a hefty $5000 per developer (for commercial use), this is not a system that small companies with limited budgets are likely to rush to take on without talking long and hard to the bank manager first.

On the plus side, however, if you don’t plan to use it commercially, you can download the entire package free. And if you are a startup company, Morfik has a ‘use now, pay later’ scheme too.

This really is a seductive system for generating interactive web applications. I just hope the company sees sense and comes up with a name which more readily trips off the tongue than Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder....