Visual WebGui News & Announcements

We want to share with you our excitement with a new alternative development experience which is under development in response to web developers' requests. The new Declarative programming facilitates the transition into VWG for web developers   who want to incorporate VWG runtime benefits of responsiveness, richness and absolute by-design security, but feel more at home with declarative programming. For those developers, VWG is going to provide development paradigm that uses markup languages and allows ‘on demand' compilation and as a result; “notepad” style ftp editing with no need for Visual Studio IDE.

Guy Peled the architect of VWG stated that "the development experience or rather paradigms were never the essence of VWG. The actual essence is the productivity and the fully event base programming in developing AJAX style applications which are provided with the responsiveness, richness and security of native server applications."

While ASP.NET provides an event base approach it is completely dismissed when working with AJAX and the richness of the server is lost and replaced with JavaScript programming and couple with a very high security risk. It causes developers to choose from a better Ajax responsiveness or more structured event based programming – but not both.

Visual WebGui reinstates the power of the server for rich AJAX development and provides a statefull yet scalable, server centric architecture that provides the benefits and user interactivity of AJAX with the security and developer productivity we had before AJAX stormed into our lives.

When I first came up with the concept of Visual WebGui, I was frustrated by the fragile and complex nature of developing web applications. The contrast in productivity between working in a fully OOP compiled environment vs. scripting, even today, with JQuery, Dojo and such, is still huge. Even today the greatest sponsor of JavaScript programming, Google, is offering a framework to avoid JavaScript using Java that compiles to JavaScript (GWT).

So being frustrated with existing state of web development I decided to find a way to abstract the complexity or rather delegate the complex job to enable developers to concentrate on the “What” instead of the “How”. Choosing the form based approach was intuitive when I considered the greatest value to be for enterprise LOB apps… So I embraced the Form based approach for the developer experience and obviously it provides classic enterprise developers a familiar and productive environment they are used to get from their desktop developments," adds Guy Peled.

While the traditional OOP development still rules the enterprise development, the differences between web sites and web applications have blurred and so did the differences between classic developers and web developers. So we see declarative languages in desktop / backend development environments (WPF / WF) and we see OOP, gaining more and more power in web development (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET DOM).  However, what has not changed is enterprise need for security, development ROI, reach, highly responsive and interactive UIs and scalability. The advantages that declarative languages and 'on demand' compiling provide over classic development is change mostly, the flexibility and offer a more readable initialize component.

So what Gizmox team is working on is kind of like a replacement of the designer initialize component with XAML code that allows the developer to work with ease and simplicity.

The first stage will be, providing a fully working SDK that can be completely designed using XAML. We are going to provide a new project template called Visual WebGui Sites which is the equivalent to ASP.NET web application vs. ASP.NET web site. The code in the new project template will be compiled on demand using the build provider mechanism ASP.NET has.

This means that the performance hit is only on the first request and after that the performance is the same as a prebuilt solution. This will allow the flexibility of a dynamically updated sites and the power of fully blown enterprise applications over web. You can also use prebuilt features available in ASP.NET to enjoy both worlds in production.

This development alternative will be gradually added to the SDK as it does not affect stability. After all, it is just a different language to work with the same core.

We believe that the first workable preview version will be released in a 3-4 weeks, which will allow you guys to start and experience with. As VWG version progresses it will be more and more integrated into the development environment and to the core. Features such as Form.SaveToXaml or Form.LoadFromXaml can be of great advantage even when using XAML,  as a designing paradigm is not required.

VWG Sites (VWG XAML) implementation will be the first truly compliable XAML implementation as Microsoft implemented Silverlight and WPF as a runtime markup interpretation opposed to the ASP.NET markup implementation which is compiled to CLR code once. We have chosen to implement the VWG Sites parser as a different way to create CLR code that provides greater performance over the reflection alternative.

VWG  Sites will also be the first server side XAML  UI engine which, while providing  the power of XAML, it will not require any plug-ins or installations on the client side.

You can see here a video demonstrating VWG Sites markup in action below.