Craig Martin

Flex in a Week

2008-08-08T12:04:00.003+08:00

Even with the stir of excitement caused by uniPaaS, it would pay any Magic developer to investigate Flex as alternate RIA front-end to future Magic/eDeveloper/uniPaaS applications, I believe the Flex-Magic coupling to be a potent force for rich, rapid applications.

I'd heartily recommend the excellent Flex training that's available via subscription at Lynda.com or TotalTraining.com but Adobe also just released a free, quick and dirty Flex-in-a-week series of tutorials. A little rough at the edges in comparison, but this seems well-structured and detailed enough to get to grips with Flex quickly.

Check it out: Flex-in-a-Week

MUSE Presentations on uniPaaS, iBolt and Beyond

2008-07-27T23:34:00.002+08:00

It's been several years since I was last able to attend the annual MUSE (Magic User Group in the UK) conferences but the freely-distributed presentations to the most recent in July 2008 came into my possession and they are simply just too good not to share.

Between then and now, of course, uniPaaS and iBolt 3 have been officially released but there is still some great background information in these powerpoints not discussed elsewhere. Worth the look over a coffee.

You can download these from here:

MUSE Presentations, July 2008

Using Magic uniPaaS with Apache

2008-07-27T16:17:00.005+08:00

Installing Magic Software's new uniPaaS development studio is pretty smooth, the only gotcha I encountered is that there is no mention of the fact that if you are not using IIS and instead you are using Apache or Apache as part of the WAMP stack, you'll need to manually configure your httpd.conf file - simple enough.

Here's what you must add to httpd.conf - note that I installed into c:\magic\unipaas and you must make these aliases resolve to whatever you used as your install directory.

### Added for unipaas

ScriptAlias /uniScripts/ "C:/magic/unipaas/scripts/"

<Directory "C:/magic/unipaas/scripts/">
AllowOverride None
Options None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Alias /uniRIACache/ "C:/magic/unipaas/RIACache/"

<Directory "C:/magic/unipaas/RIACache/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Alias /uniRIAModules/ "C:/magic/unipaas/RIAModules/"

<Directory "C:/magic/unipaas/RIAModules/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

Alias /uniRIAProjects/ "C:/magic/unipaas/Projects/"

<Directory "C:/magic/unipaas/Projects/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

###

Finally, ensure the InternetDispatcherPath setting in Magic.ini is defined as follows:

InternetDispatcherPath = /uniScripts/mgrqcgi010.exe

Restart Apache after making those changes and you should be good to go. Welcome to the future of RIA development.

---

It's worth mentioning a useful utility that is documented if you find yourself with java issues in this interim period where RC deployment is using java

Assuming you have the uniRIAModules alias set-up as described above or as installed in an IIS environment, open Internet Explorer (!) and access

http://localhost/uniRIAModules/RCDeploymentAssistor.htm

and this should indicate the unipaas-worthiness of your current java install and prompt you to fix it where necessary

If you install to a machine other than your local one, use the server-name in place of localhost, you know the drill

If you have yet to install uniPaaS and don't have specific java requirements for other applications or development tools, I would suggest you install the latest JRE from www.java.com

---

One more thing...

Just walked someone through a fix to their set-up

A useful test, and a dependency, is that you have the requester set-up correctly, that you can, say, access something as simple as

http://localhost/uniScripts/mgrqcgi010.exe

and see the MBSOD (magic blue screen of death)
Here, it's a good thing, it proves the requester
is accessible correctly and RC depends on that.

So a combination of RCDeploymentAssistor, verifying the
requester is available, adding aliases to apache if need be
ought to see you just get it working.

iPhone v2.0 Unlock/Jailbreak

2008-07-26T10:19:00.009+08:00

Thanks to the people who wrote Pwnage, upgrading my 2g iPhone to v2.0 and subsequently unlocking it and jailbreaking it was pretty easy.

I just followed these steps:

How to Unlock/Jailbreak Your 2.0 2G iPhone (Mac) over at iClarified and all was good.

Well, there were a couple of moments where it seemed like it had all gone to hell in a handbasket but that was down to me not making sure it was in DFU (device firmware update) mode at the correct time and another time the device just sat at the Pwnage pineapple start screen forever but perseverance paid off.

After I applied the custom restore ipsw (iphone firmware update file) Pwnage creates, iTunes wouldn't let me add applications - without any reason or reaction, they just never made it to the device, but thankfully after walking through the custom restore procedure a second time that problem disappeared. There are quite a few interesting, new free apps at the iTunes AppStore, it's worth the effort upgrading your iPhone. Kudos to the iPhone Dev Team.

uniPaaS - It's a Kind of Magic

2008-07-20T14:15:00.004+08:00

I've used Magic Software's development tools all of my professional, working life. It's been time and energy that has always paid-off in the simple business of delivering software that works. So when I heard Magic had something new coming up, I was keen to get the true dirt. Let's see if I can spill some beans here.

uniPaaS - It's not your Father's Magic

The big splashes and ripples in the pool of the software industry turn out often to be simple and innovative ideas wrapped in unnecessarily complex language and buzzwords. To get to the cut and thrust of the vision for uniPaaS you'll have to wade through a lot of acronyms and BS. But the ripples of this one are good, the ripples are good, especially for Magicians (what Magic developers call themselves).

As the rumour-mill swung into action on the Magic Developer's Mailing List regarding G5, rich-client and uniPaas, Sherm Levine came up with the image of Product Marketing throwing a box full of word-magnets at the refrigerator door to see what stuck. The truth never hurts.

So chances are you know Magic. You know how great it's been at abstracting technological complexity and just let the developer focus on implementing business logic in a unique table-driven development environment with greatly reduced coding and time to market. It's a tool that makes it easy to appear smart and get things done.

Shortcut to Greatness

As the technological waves swept over developer communities these past 20 years, Magic has always proven the shortcut to greatness by remaining true to its table-driven metaphor providing the means to create and migrate apps from early DOS days,to UNIX, to Windows, to Client-Server architectures and any database you can name, followed recently by web and browser-based deployment methods. Well, you know the story, we've been on a long road. No pause for breath it's about to turn into a thrill-ride.

uniPaaS is the next evolution of the eDeveloper tool, and now aims to round-out its offering by delivering RIA (rich internet applications) and adopting a SaaS model, what Magic terms a SaaS-enabled application platform (SEAP).

As ever, wikipedia has worthy reference materials:

SaaS - Software as a service

PaaS - Platform as a service

Magic has an exceptionally strong pitch to make here. If PaaS is the provision of the platform an organization needs for development, test, deployment, data storage, integration and so forth, available on-line and supporting multi-tenancy, scalable and robust applications, then eDeveloper + iBolt + Rich Client + Partitioning/M&M server is the complete, unified paradigm.

Magic's Rich Client technology has been under development for some time, undergone extensive beta-test particularly with clients such as Fujitsu in Japan and will finally see release this month.

This places Magic into the arena with more mainstream RIA technologies such as Flex or Silverlight, but where Magic really scores is that it provides the entire technology stack, Flex and Silverlight meanwhile although creating incredibly rich, expressive and immersive application experiences that Magic can't quite match yet, do need other complex development tools to deliver a complete application solution.

I'll provide a hands-on write-up and some demos in another post on Rich Client but basically what you have in this v1.0 release of uniPaaS is Magic/eDeveloper as we know it with the addition of a Rich Client form type which is right now based on Java technology. (A Magic developer does nothing different simply the application is deployed over the internet using java swt)

So Magic's release schedule appears to be something like this:

Now - uniPaaS v1.0 - development of RC apps with java-based deployment

September 2008 - v1.5 - development and deployment of RC based on .net

February 2009 - v2.0 - everything that's been promised with the uniPaaS roadmap - including .net based clients that can embed .net form controls, access .net assemblies, deploy on windows mobile clients, fuller saas support including a new tenancy monitoring and management server, failover and enhancements in the area of web-services, ajax plumbing for html-merge, and a round of UI, IDE and productivity changes.

I expect you'll be reading a lot more about uniPaaS in the coming months. First up, Bloor have written a simple overview of Magic and uniPaaS here:

Bloor's Magic Story

Stay tuned.

Magic Developer Survey 2008

2008-06-14T11:54:00.009+08:00

If you're a Magic Developer (and a magicu-l subscriber) then hop on over to Magic User List Survey 2008 and share your views and insights.

Update: 02 July, 2008
The poll has now closed, results can be viewed here:
Magic User List Survey 2008 - Results

HotFudge XLS Beta

2008-06-12T10:41:00.006+08:00

Today, I released HotFudge XLS v0.5 into general beta test for the Magic Developer community.

HotFudge XLS allows software developers to create, query and update Excel worksheets without complex COM commands.

The download includes demo application exports for Magic/eDeveloper v7,v8,v9 & v10.

Update: A quick revision adds some extra functionality and improves the v9/10 demos. Get HotFudge XLS v0.6