Morfik FX

Last updated

Morfik FX is a tool for developing Ajax-based Web applications. It is one of a family of tools from Morfik Technologies, a company based in Australia. Morfik FX is an update to a product previously called Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder and uses the Object Pascal programming language for writing all the application's code, for both the Web browser and Server portions.

Contents

Morfik FX provides a Rapid Application Development (RAD) environment for the creation of Web applications. This environment included a Visual Designer with WYSIWYG capabilities that supports a range of visual effects.

Product History

The first Professional License for Morfik WebOS AppsBuilder (the precursor to Morfik FX), 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 [1] and its name was changed to "Morfik 07"). See also here

In November 2008, v2.0 of the AppsBuilder product was officially released with an entirely redesigned interface. This release broke down the programming language support into separate versions called FX (Object Pascal) and BX (Basic). It was at this point that the Morfik FX product moniker was introduced.

In August 2009, Morfik released AppsBuilder 2.1 which, though numbered as a simple point update, contained a significant number of new features such as the ability to visually create Widgets (user created controls). With this release support for the C# programming language which was dropped with the release of 2.0, was reintroduced with a Morfik CX moniker.

In October 2010 Morfik released AppsBuilder 3.0 with improved support for Widgets and Packages. Version 3.0 of Morfik FX adds a new set of visual design objects which represent individual pages within an application. These objects make it much easier for developers to create the navigational structure of their applications in a manner that is search engine friendly.

In November 2010 Morfik Technologies, the maker of Morfik FX, was acquired by Altium Limited.

Distinguishing Product Features

Morfik FX is a Web development tool that runs on the Windows operating system. The following are the most distinguishing features of Morfik FX:

Visual Development

Morfik uses a WYSIWYG interface designer to allow the developer to visually create the interface for web-based applications. The visual designers built into the Morfik development environment closely parallel visual design tools for desktop application development, providing the same sort of capabilities for the creation Web applications.

While visually designing the interface of a Web application with Morfik FX the developer will create Forms which define the positioning of controls and their appearance and then combine these Forms in a higher level visual object called a Page.

Web Services

Morfik provides two different ways for developers to create Web Service entry points in Web applications. In Morfik terminology these entry point are called Web Methods. There is a visual editor for defining the input and output parameters of Web Methods which also creates the boilerplate code for handling both the server and browser side to guide the developer. An experienced developer can, however, totally bypass the visual designer and just hand code the entry points which are implemented as specialized classes with special metadata attributes applied to them.

See also

Related Research Articles

Integrated development environment Software application used to develop software

An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools and a debugger. Some IDEs, such as NetBeans and Eclipse, contain the necessary compiler, interpreter, or both; others, such as SharpDevelop and Lazarus, do not.

C++Builder is a rapid application development (RAD) environment, originally developed by Borland and as of 2009 owned by Embarcadero Technologies, for writing programs in the C++ programming language currently targeting Windows, iOS and for several releases, macOS and Android C++Builder combines the Visual Component Library and IDE written in Object Pascal with multiple C++ compilers. Most components developed in Delphi can be used in C++Builder with no or little modification, although the reverse is not true, but this constraint is valid only for source code. Binary code generated by Delphi can easily be linked to binary code generated by C++Builder and vice versa to generate an executable written in both Object Pascal and C++. With this approach, C++ can be called from Object Pascal and vice versa. Since both Delphi and C++ use the same back end linker, the debugger can single step from Delphi code into C++ transparently.

Delphi (software)

Delphi is a software product that uses the Delphi dialect of the Object Pascal programming language and provides an integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development of desktop, mobile, web, and console software, currently developed and maintained by Embarcadero Technologies.

Extensible Application Markup Language is a declarative XML-based language developed by Microsoft that is used for initializing structured values and objects. It is available under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise. The acronym originally stood for Extensible Avalon Markup Language, Avalon being the code-name for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

Object Pascal is an extension to the programming language Pascal that provides object-oriented programming (OOP) features such as classes and methods.

BBEdit Proprietary text editor

BBEdit is a proprietary text editor made by Bare Bones Software, originally developed for Macintosh System Software 6, and currently supporting macOS.

Graphical user interface builder

A graphical user interface builder, also known as GUI designer, is a software development tool that simplifies the creation of GUIs by allowing the designer to arrange graphical control elements using a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor. Without a GUI builder, a GUI must be built by manually specifying each widget's parameters in source-code, with no visual feedback until the program is run.

PowerBuilder is an integrated development environment owned by SAP since the acquisition of Sybase in 2010. On July 5, 2016, SAP and Appeon entered into an agreement whereby Appeon would be responsible for developing, selling, and supporting PowerBuilder.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is a free and open-source graphical subsystem originally developed by Microsoft for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications. WPF, previously known as "Avalon", was initially released as part of .NET Framework 3.0 in 2006. WPF uses DirectX and attempts to provide a consistent programming model for building applications. It separates the user interface from business logic, and resembles similar XML-oriented object models, such as those implemented in XUL and SVG.

Interface Builder

Interface Builder is a software development application for Apple's macOS operating system. It is part of Xcode, the Apple Developer developer's toolset. Interface Builder allows Cocoa and Carbon developers to create interfaces for applications using a graphical user interface. The resulting interface is stored as a .nib file, short for NeXT Interface Builder, or more recently, as an XML-based .xib file.

A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and deploy web applications on the World Wide Web. Web frameworks aim to automate the overhead associated with common activities performed in web development. For example, many web frameworks provide libraries for database access, templating frameworks, and session management, and they often promote code reuse. Although they often target development of dynamic web sites, they are also applicable to static websites.

Omnis Studio is a rapid application development (RAD) tool that allows programmers and application developers to create enterprise, web, and mobile applications for Windows, Linux, and macOS personal computers and servers across all business sectors.

Morfik Technology Pty Ltd. is an Australian software company that was acquired by Altium in 2010.

Microsoft Visual Studio Code editor and IDE

Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs, as well as websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It can produce both native code and managed code.

WaveMaker

WaveMaker is an enterprise grade Java low code platform for building software applications and platforms. WaveMaker Inc. is headquartered in Mountainview, California. For enterprises, WaveMaker is a powerful low code platform that accelerates their app development and IT modernization efforts. For ISVs, it is a consumable low code component that can sit inside their product and offer extreme customizations.

The Softwell Maker is an environment development. Designer uses visual forms and reports (WYSIWYG), business rules, and visually representing other actions using flowcharts.

Dart is a client-optimized programming language for apps on multiple platforms. It is developed by Google and is used to build mobile, desktop, server, and web applications.

Chromium Embedded Framework

The Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is an open-source software framework for embedding a Chromium web browser within another application. This enables developers to add web browsing functionality to their application, as well as the ability to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create the application's user interface.

Delphi is a software product that uses the Object Pascal programming language and provides an integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development of desktop, mobile, web, and console software, currently developed and maintained by Embarcadero Technologies. Delphi evolved from Borland's "Turbo Pascal for Windows", itself an evolution with Windows support from Borland's Turbo Pascal and Borland Pascal with Objects, very fast 16-bit native-code MS-DOS compilers with their own sophisticated integrated development environment (IDE) and textual user interface toolkit for DOS. Early Turbo Pascal was written in a dialect of the Pascal programming language; in later versions support for objects was added, and it was named Object Pascal.

References

  1. ↑ "Morfik 07 Released With Zero-Deployment-Cost Perpetual License". Market Wire. 2007-03-22.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.