I know the title sounds like I am a sales guy for Midnight Coders, but I was pretty impressed with what I saw and felt the need to share this.

I was at a Boeing Flex User Group meeting yesterday that is hosted by Mike Kollen and a couple folks at Boeing.  Mark Piller (CEO of MidNight Coders) showed off the capabilities of WebOrb which is a "platform enabling development, deployment and runtime execution of Rich Internet Applications.  The product facilitates connectivity between rich clients created with Flex, Flash or AJAX adn server-side applicationed developed with .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP or XML Web Services."  Mark showed us how easy it was to start a project using WebOrb to create all of the backend services and the client side actionscript, than create a project in Flex Builder 3/Eclipse and bring over the items WebOrb created.  In a matter of minutes he created a simple demonstration that was communicating back to the newly created serverside logic. 

Mark showed two demonstrations, one with a .NET backend and one with a Java backend.  I was pretty impressed with the capability and how easy it was.  One thing I was really impressed with was it has Data Service capability out of the box.  Now its not Adobe's Data Services, its their implementation of the concept and capability of Data Services.  The second thing I was impressed with was the fact that this is all FREE... yes FREE!  The product support of course is not free, a guy has to make a buck here and there somehow.

Mark also showed us a working prototype that uses BlueDragon.  This prototype basically couples the Java code that is generated to CFC's that are generated and can be used in CFM pages or other CFC's.  I am glad he talked about this, because I was rather disappointed at first that WebOrb doesnt support ColdFusion.  Now that I know they have a working prototype for BlueDragon I know its possible to do the same thing for ColdFusion.

The generated actionscript code supports many different outputs, like AS 2.0 Flash Remoting, AS 3.0 Flex Remoting, AJAX Client,  and it supports some frameworks like PureMVC, Cairngorm 2.2, ARP Framework, etc... from what I saw all of the normal AS 2.0 and 3.0 code was generated using the MVC Design Pattern.

Mark showed us how easy it was to pull in data into a component like a datagrid.  Here is a quick example of the generated API from my memory.

Something else he showed off was the ability to call special modified queries on the fly like such:

Or you could combine properties in your call like this:

There are really a ton of capabilities and I don't want to talk to each of them here, but a neat feature was the ability to come up with a ROI of the generated code.  Basically WebOrb lets you see what your Return on Investment is.  It calculates the amount of generated code it outputed, and you can input other parameters like the cost of the developer, how many lines of code that developer generates of a course of say a month and it takes that information and provides a cost benefit number.  For example if WebOrb generated 2000 lines of code and I have one developer who usually outputs 1000 lines of code a month and I am paying X amount of dollars my savings, because I used WebOrb is X amount of dollars.  Now obviously there are other factors that need to be taken into consideration, but its a cool little feature that could help in seeing the overall value due to the time savings when using WebOrb.

Some other features to check out:

• Test Drive
• Monitoring
• Code Generator Modifications (Modify XSLT files)
• Data Management (supports SQL Server, MySQL and ODBC (for all others))
• Support of Many to Many relationships in the code generation (nice!)
• Remote Shared Object Support
• Video Chat, Text Chat, Flex Messaging

I highy recommend downloading WebOrb in your preferred serverside choice and check it out. Hopefully in the near future we will see a ColdFusion supported version ;) hint hint....