Re: Morfik - amazing!

Tom wrote:
Having paid through the nose for IW in the past, I wanted to know if any
other developers have deployed IW solutions. I do *not* believe the
marketing bung! You can believe what you want.

FWIW, we have deployed IW applications. I like IW, but mostly for a
specific kind of application.

IW is mostly suited to those kinds of applications that are traditional
IT client/server GUI apps that need to be on the web. This typically
means intranet/extranet type front-end to a database applications.

In "app mode", which is what almost everyone uses, everything is
positioned absolutely. This isn't "weblike" at all and is much more
application like. Using IW, I don't bother to look at the markup that's
generated. It's a mess; supporting "tab order" is a hack because of it.
There's no such thing as "document order", etc. CSS support isn't
terribly elegant.

But that's not what IW is about. IW is about creating IT
"front-end-to-a-db" applications in the "Delphi way". It attempts to
insulate the developer from "messy" JS/HTML which may be regarded as a
good thing by those who don't want to know anything about it.

As we've moved forward, we've stripped out a lot of IW's Intraweb-ness
but we still use it because it offers some infrastructure stuff that we
don't have to write ourselves. My colleague is doing most of the IW
coding and he has far more patience than I do hacking up JS and crafting
markup. It's certainly *faster* to crank it out with IW.

So basically, yes, I like IW, it's good enough and can build out
functional IT applications very quickly. But if I choose to use it, I'm
not going to look at the markup and I'm not going to build a website
with it.

Brian, has been the most helpful in pointing me in some very good
directions. After further studying of EXTJS/Yahoo UI/JSON, I can tell
you that Freepascal looks like a decent alternative for rich web UIs
(the future).

Thanks, I'm really digging ExtJS with a minimal backend server. I'm
currently using a REST type API serving out XML from an embedded DB all
from a "desktop" application by hosting Firefox via LLMozLib. It all
works quite well.

I converted from Indy to Synapse with my application since it's the
smallest socket server I can get working reasonably quickly. Also
Synapse supports Freepascal if I choose to go that route in the future
and it will enable me to move more of my infrastructure code. I'm not
sure what the status of Indy on FPC is, when I looked it wasn't clear.

But if I want to move that application elsewhere, I suspect that I'll be
using C++, Ruby, PHP or ASP.NET to support the same ExtJS UI. This is
the beauty of ExtJS, I can move it from place to place without fear that
the UI work I've done will become completely obsolete. I can move it
from desktop to website, website to desktop, website to website.

Using ExtJS is more coding up front than IW or something like Morfik,
and it takes a bit more trial/error in environments that might not be
comfortable for the Delphi developer, but I think it's worth it.
Especially if you've done some web development before.

Using modern libraries that abstract away all the browser differences
and odd behaviors, you can get quite far, very quickly. Also tools like
FireBug are great for debugging and inspecting values in the page.

BTW, I can't wait for ExtJS 2.0. I'm really looking forward to the
different layout options that they've talked about.

--
Brian Moelk
Brain Endeavor LLC
bmoelk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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