TDreamRich: The dream 10 years later.

Foreign Correspondent 

It has been almost a decade since Dream Company folded and its owner, Sergey Kostinsky moved from Ukraine to Australia, dumping all their customers (sounds familiar? The owner of KSDEV did the same thing).

One component which was never quite released is TDreamRich, the supposedly RichEdit component replacement written in Delphi, it was never completed, lot of people on Embarcadero's forums complained about problems moving DreamMemo from Delphi (non-Unicode) to Unicode and unable to upgrade it, ditto with DreamScripter, DreamReports. DreamReports probably prompted Borland to remove all the design-time units for Delphi, since Borland found some people illegally breaking the EULA and since DelphiIDE is a "trade-secret", they didn't like people replicating the Delphi IDE with Delphi's own source codes.

If you combine DreamReports + DreamScripter + DreamMemo, you had something similar to the Delphi 4 IDE, along with reusable design-time packages, drag & drop form designing, Resource streaming and Handle --> to Delphi component control development.

You can do this even better in Visual C++ with custom resource streaming, MFC custom-control development. ProfUIS does this well. The idea is you expose the whole CodeJock suite as custom-controls inside the ProfUIS run-time IDE, add JavaScript library and CodeJock editor and voila! Visual C++ scripting environment to give to your customers.

Apparently, Morfik has been taken over by Altium and lot of complaints started to fly around - like non-working editor, non-working database controls, non-working IDE, essentially becoming like a toy language.

New comers, expecting that Morfik eased the pain from transitioning from Delphi to Web, found very few things actually worked. Either there were memory leaks or the people who wrote ZEOS database library never did careful job of their product (i.e., Morfik uses ZEOS internally) and constantly blew up with MySQL.

There was lack-of-support for other Ajax libraries, such as Mortal Kombat Jax ExtJS, Moo Library, YUL and so on. There were 8 ways to deploy Morfik, but none of them actually made sense or too many steps to deploy.

Last summer, the Developers at Morfik realized the product was full of bugs and decided to make it for free. The people on the Morfik forum supported each other and the developers would drop in once a fortnight to answer a couple of questions and in a seemly Un-Australian manner, decided not to respond to them.

Now, any "offensive post" is simply deleted or your account is closed (Source).

Quoted:

A couple of days back allot of users was banned for 90 days, because their posts are uncomfortable, not because they are evil but because they demand to get what they have paid for and been promised.

Using offensive words or newbie questions - like - "how do you use PHP with Morfik", or any mention of "ASP.NET" will simply get you banned or your postings removed.

In the mean-time, your reviewer was using Visual Studio 2010 to write websites. At least it makes customers happy and brings in revenue.

I'm not sure about developers using Morfik. Maybe the name Morfik gives some clues about the kind of product it is - it eases the pain, makes the user delusional and emptying his wallet, get fired from jobs and leads to loss of income.

You can read the train-wreck in action at this moment happening on Morfik forums.

Tarry ho, would you like to go to the pub and have some Victoria Bitter? ...

:)