We’re excited to announce a new OEM agreement with StoneRiver, a leading provider of technology solutions for the insurance industry. StoneRiver is creating a new Flex user interface for its LifeSuite, LPES and Electronic Application products and WebORB is being used to deliver high performance connectivity with StoneRiver’s .NET services. StoneRiver anticipates that this will improve time-to-market, simplify new business acquisition and reduce acquisition expenses. View Press Release.
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2010 was great! We added a ton of great features, released a bunch of new versions, added a lot of great customers, and set a new revenue record! This year is going to be absolutely awesome. How do I know? Look no further, below is a very compact view of our roadmap just for this year alone. There are some blank cells in the table and we plan to (very aggressively) fill all the cells in the table up. As the world is going mobile on the client-side and the server-side is moving towards the cloud, our goal is to establish ourselves as the one-stop integration hub for interconnecting everything. iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Windows Phones, Flex apps, Flash apps, HTML5 apps all talking to your databases, backend services, exchanging data over messaging channels, streaming and recording videos while you make money, because we made it easier for you to get there faster. This should be a lot of fun!
You can Download the latest release and then check back as we add documentation. Feel free to comment or ask questions in the Developer Forum or visit our JIRA Bug Tracking System to watch or participate in our WebORB for Java development. CURRENT ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS: Please contact your account manager to receive a new v.4.0 license key since this is a major point release. Below, please find the screencast version of this “Hello, World!” blarticle. It’s not the spiffiest screencast I’ve ever seen. I made it using TechSmith’s Camtasia, which has far more features than I know how to use. As I learn more about Camtasia, these screencasts will improve accordingly. Lots of new stuff to learn! Whee!
While many developers are skilled in either client- or server-side programming, few are experts in both and fewer still are experts in integration. Typically the painful task of writing the integration code falls to the server-side developers, who are only too happy to find a better way to do integration. WebORB was created to take the burden of integration off the shoulders of developers, enabling them to focus more on their core areas of expertise. As a result, WebORB enables workflow to be more efficient and the following 5 integration problems resolved. Problem #1: How can I, as a developer, create and manage a complex integration code base that is spread across multiple environments? WebORB Console offers a powerful way to learn about, create, test and manage your integration code all from within a single user interface. In fact, the Alcora Group, a purchasing and logicstics company, recommends WebORB for agile projects, because “We have constantly changing requirements and the WebORB data management console is a great tool for reducing our development time.” View webinar on How to Use WebORB (1 hour) Problem #2 Uggh! I’m spending all my time writing integration code, when I really would like to be spending time writing my application logic. Now I’m behind schedule. Is there a better approach? WebORB provides access to many code generators and in Version 4, you can add your own custom code generators to the WebORB console. Essentially, with the touch of a button, you can auto generate the client-side ActionScript code that provides all the plumbing required to integrate client applications with server-side services. This is an important tool when it comes to producing repeatable blocks of code or functionality. In addition, WebORB Data Management for Flex (WDMF) provides a powerful way to do fully managed CRUD operations. According to global digital marketing agency LBI, Inc., “We never considered any alternative to WebORB, because WebORB offers a reliable way for my team to minimize their deployed code base and focus their efforts on the user experience and visual design elements.”
Learn More About WebORB Code Generation and WDMF Problem #3 I feel like I’m working in the blind. I’d be more productive if I could just visualize and access the information I need most from a single UI. WebORB Console includes both a service browser and server monitor. The service browser graphically visualizes the deployment structure for all deployed assemblies, including the classes and methods. Server configuration and monitoring can be done directly from within the console too. Digital Matrix states, “One of the features we like the most is the performance monitor. We like to see data that we can manage and the console allows us to do that. When a problem occurs, we can see rather quickly if it is on the client-side or the server-side.”
Learn More About WebORB Service Browser and Performance Monitoring Problem #4 I feel like code is being bounced back and forth between the client and server development teams and it’s driving me nuts. If I could just code, test and move on, I’d be way more productive. WebORB Console includes an intuitive invocation test drive feature for invoking server methods in those services that can be exposed as remoting services. This enables server developers to test their remoting services and confidently pass them off knowing the methods work before any client-side code is written. Pepper’s Ghost Productions, maker of web-based educational games for kids, loves this feature, because “It allowed us to run existing methods and see the generated output without the client code. Had we not had the Invocation Test Drive feature, we would have had to throw out the client code that invoked these methods and then try to guess what the results were in order to parse the data.” Learn More About WebORB Invocation Test Drive Problem #5 I use a common IDE and would rather not have to figure out how to make my IDE work with yet another development environment. Getting started with WebORB is really easy. To make things simple, we’ve provided integrations into Visual Studio, FlexBuilder and FlashBuilder. We’ve also created Visual Studio project templates for .NET and Silverlight developers. Eclipse users working with Flex Builder or FlashBuilder can use the built in project wizards included with the IDE. According to Global Village Publishing, “WebORB allowed us to get up and running very quickly and provides the perfect interface for us. We can just update the components or make changes to our database calls all without knowing anything about Flex. This enables us to turn around new requests very efficiently and quickly.” Learn more about IDE Integration As always, we’d like to know if you found this post helpful and encourage you to provide feedback especially if you can share how some of these WebORB features have helped you. Since we migrated off of Yahoo! Groups, I received a few emails from the users who thought the new discussion forum does not support email list functionality. This is not exactly true. The new forum supports both email distribution of the new posts and also has RSS feeds for every individual forum. For example, the link below is a direct URL for the “General Discussion” forum for WebORB for .NET: http://www.themidnightcoders.com/forum/Default.aspx?g=topics&f=13 If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you will see the “Rss Feed” link:
Additionally, if you create a user account on the forum, login and open the link shown above, there is going to be an additional link to “Watch Forum”. When you click on the link, you will automatically subscribe to receive emails for the posts in the selected forum:
The only thing we have not figured out is how users can use email to submit messages to the forum. Hopefully there is a solution for that too. Until then, you will need to use the web interface to post messages.
http://www.themidnightcoders.com/forum/ The content from the Yahoo! Group is localized at: The process of migration was a bit painful, but I am very happy it is done and we can move on with a single home for all Midnight Coders discussions. We have been using JIRA for tracking bugs, features and development tasks for our products for quite a while. (If you’re not familiar with JIRA, you should definitely check it out – it is an excellent bug tracking system). Over the years it has helped us out with tracking development schedules and managing product releases. The only problem is our users and customers had no visibility into the system. As of today, we made changes to allow anyone to signup, create an account and start submitting tickets in our bug tracking system. The tickets you submit can be bugs, feature suggestions or ideas for improvements. Additionally, you can vote for the features in the product road maps and thus influence the timeline for getting them into the product releases. The URL for the system is: http://bugs.themidnightcoders.com If you have any ideas on how we can improve this process even further, please let us know by commenting on this post. |
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It is no secret that there are two development environments to consider when developing Rich Internet Applications -the client-side and the server-side. How to integrate these two environments can pose a perplexing problem for developers, leading them to search for a solution like WebORB.
