In the first part of this blog I will take you through the steps involved in setting up and connecting to a virtual machine on Amazon cloud computing services. In the second part I will detail the exact steps involved in installing a Morfik XApp as a native Apache 2 module under Linux.
You might well ask why someone from Morfik would talk about a cloud hosting platform like Amazon. The best thing about cloud computing is the ability to use all the resources you need in a very simple way and pay only for the resources being used. Just like electricity in your home, you flick the switch and you have light, or turn it off when you don’t need it. Power is at your fingertips and you choose when you access the power.
Filed under General by on Feb 3rd, 2010. 2 Comments. 
In the science of thermodynamics, the concept of Entropy represents a “measure of disorder”. According to this concept “Systems evolve toward a state of maximum entropy”.
This notion has a parallel in software engineering, “Software systems evolve toward a state of maximum complexity”.
Desktop computing started in a simple way. The platform consisted of a simple processor, a simple single-tasking single-user operating system and a number of simple programming languages. As software applications evolved things became increasingly complex, slowing down the progress. So something had to be done.
Filed under General by on Feb 1st, 2010. 1 Comment.
Developers who seek their fortune in the web business applications market must face and survive seven ordeals and success will only favour those who come prepared.
1. The First Ordeal: User experience
2. The Second Ordeal: Compatibility
3. The Third Ordeal: Time to market
4. The Fourth Ordeal: Finding the right tool
5. The Fifth Ordeal: Integration
For developers who plan to make a transition from desktop to the web, the distributed nature of Cloud Computing presents the greatest challenge. The past experience has shown that initial reaction of most desktop developers is to retreat to the server and avoid browser side computing at all cost. Many vendors went along with this and focused their emphasis on the server-side. As a result, many promising projects ended up as mediocre implementations with poor user experience and lack of scalability.
Filed under General by on Jan 30th, 2010. 2 Comments.
We are pleased to announce the release of our Google Analytics package which is designed to make using Google Analytics in Morfik applications easy. Google Analytics is a free on-line service that is widely used on the Web to monitor site traffic. It can gather and analyse information about the traffic to your website, and generate comprehensive reports. Monitoring your website traffic is critical to ensuring that your website is meeting its objectives.
Those averse to JavaScript often lose interest and abandon the idea of using Google Analytics since it requires dropping down to HTML and fiddling with JavaScript. With Morfik’s Google Analytics package this is no longer necessary!
Let’s have a quick look at how it works:
Filed under General, Technical by on Jan 29th, 2010. Comment.
Did you know that florists play a major role in your life? In fact they have been involved in your life since before you were even born. It started when your parents proudly announced to the world that they were expecting a new baby. There were flowers. Then came the big day when you graced this world with your existence. There were more flowers. As the days turned into months and months into years, your birthdays brought more flowers. Sometimes you were ill. You received flowers. Then there was first love. More flowers. Graduation, first job, engagement, promotion, marriage, and your own babies all brought their flower moments – you get the picture! Unless like me you plan to live forever, one day there will be flowers for your funeral, and even for some years after you start programming the big computer in the sky, there will be the occasional flower on your resting place.
Before you jump to the conclusion that being a florist is a fantastic occupation because you cannot lose, come rain, hail or shine, and you give up information technology to open a flower shop, let me tell you why I said all the nonsense I just said.
Filed under General by on Jan 28th, 2010. Comment.
No two businesses are the same! Market differentiation is the single most important factor in success and indeed survival of any business, big or small. In a crowded free-enterprise market, a competitive advantage results from those business processes that help uniquely differentiate a business from other players.
Businesses spend substantial amounts of money on IT infrastructure and computer applications. Some business processes such as word-processing can be handled by packaged software and still remain unique. Others can make use of highly customisable off-the-shelf packages such as accounting software. The exceptions are those unique processes that give any business its competitive advantage and are best served by custom-software development.
Filed under General by on Jan 27th, 2010. Comment.
Adobe recently released a product in BrowserLab, a hosted service that lets users view and test their Web sites in browsers they don’t have, such as IE 6 or Firefox 2.
Just enter your Web page URL and then press enter. It will display the screen capture of the browsers you selected. Make sure you set the Delay parameter to something other than 0 to ensure the dynamic part of your Web page is also captured.
Filed under Tips and Tricks by on Jan 27th, 2010. Comment.
Do you have a form with many images on it? Here is a simple way to improve its loading speed: Select all Image controls on your form, and set their Bundled property to True.
This will prompt the Morfik compiler to pack images together so that they can be all downloaded with a single request, resulting in faster page load time and better user experience – all images will appear simultaneously rather than one at a time.
Filed under Tips and Tricks by on Jan 27th, 2010. Comment.
Your website looks great when your users open it. Now you have to make sure your website looks great when search engines come to index it. Here is how you can test it: Open browser settings, turn JavaScript support off, and reload the page.
This will show exactly how your website is seen by search engines – browse through different pages to make sure everything is in order.
Filed under Tips and Tricks by on Jan 27th, 2010. Comment.
Those of you who have been with Morfik for a while may remember times when the Morfik site would go down and we would get the bad news from you guys. Thankfully those days are long gone and I can’t recall the last time a user had to contact us about a site outage.
Of course there are a number of reasons for this. Yes, Morfik software is now more mature and stable, and the auto-deployment process reduces the pain of maintenance and updates, but the main reason is that we are using a simple yet effective monitoring service which informs us immediately of any problem with our site or service. I receive a call within minutes on my cell phone!
Monitoring can be implemented at a few levels: the server level, Hosting Service Provider level and independent monitoring service level. To me the last one is the key. (And by the way I have no affiliation with any of the monitoring service providers).
If you set up your own monitoring server it is possible that your server fails long before you know it. Moreover, setting up your server to send SMS messages or make a Voice Call is not a trivial task.
Filed under General by on Jan 26th, 2010. Comment.
