To morfik or to make things work

I think it’s about time I bitch about Morifk (www.morfik.com).

Morfik is a RAD (Rapid Application Development) tool, designed to make it easy to produce applications that reside on the net (in a browser to be accurate), allowing the programmer to do all the code in either Object Pascal, Visual Basic or C#. That idea is fine and if they got it right it would be a great thing to have. But, as you may have guesse already, Morfik doesn’t live up to it’s own promises.

The first thing you may notice when you start using Morfik is that you often have to resort to using custom built data extraction routines, unless you are doing stock webpages (in which case it would have been smarter to simply have made a template webpage and sell that) — if you do not use one  of the (few) standard layouts, you are simply not going to have any use for the database aware components of Morfik. This means using webmethods and rebuilding what is essentially the same routine over and over again (code sharing is not a strong point of Morfik).

Another thing you will soon notice is that the date type is handled differently on the server and in the browser — the (to me) most odd thing is that it’s the browser that handles dates the best. In the end I had to code my own date type that doesn’t make use of server or browser specific code (of course I still need a browser and a server implementation, but since they are identical, that’s a minor issue more than a problem).

The company behind Morfik calls Morfik the WebOS, but in reality it feels more like you’re writing software for a set of operating systems that have to communicate over the most complex channel they could think of — raw socket programming in C is less complex (not really, I’m just frustrated).

Another strangeness of morfik is how text is handled. You cannot do things like casting a character to an integer and then print the result (that is the numeric value of the character) — that means that I, for example, am not able to search and replace anything out side the basic English alphabet, since I have no idea what morfik is using nor what external datasources are using. Which brings me to another point. Morfik uses unicode. Or it claims to do. Or that is, Morfik claims to be using unicode when it doesn’t claim not to do so. That is, Morfik doesn’t really do anything with unicode. In fact, Morfik doesn’t seem to be doing much really. If you try to print the danish letters ‘æ’, ‘ø’ or ‘å’ (or the capital equivelant) you get garbage — and since you have no idea what the numeric values are and (strangely) you cannot compare those letters with themselves once they have been outside of morfik, there is no way to replace them with the html codes for those letters (nor should you have to — morfik should just do things right). In order to replace these letters I had to copy the result of printing them a HTML page and use those results to search and replace all instances with the HTML codes for the letters — of course, this doesn’t work with Reports since they use an entirely different character set. In reports I can’t use either trick (casting or copying) to get it fixed.

These issues and problems are not related to the Morfik program though — the problems with the IDE are enough to make you cry. Random crashes, lock-ups and plain weirdness is abundant. For example, I often get an error message that says “Cannot copy to clipboard”, when I hit CTRL+X. The content is always copied but the original is never deleted. Also when viewing datatables (either internal or external) I often get no result at all, which locks up the database components of Morfik forcing me to shut down and restart the IDE to restore it.

I wish I could be allowed to do things in PHP. Sigh.