Developing Web applications with GeneXus X Ev1 is as easy as it was to develop WIN application with previous versions

After working with GeneXus X Ev1 for sometime now, I can say, “Thanks Artech” Why? The answer is very simple: “My life as a GeneXus developer is EASY again.” Now developing Web applications with GeneXus X Ev1 is as easy as it was to develop WIN applications with previous version.

There are many reasons why I do like the new GeneXus version:

· Great new IDE

· Full text search

· Extensions

· User Controls

· Data Selectors

· Data providers

But the one I like most is USER CONTROLS. With users controls now we can go and develop a full Web 2.0 application, adding a lot of cool stuff, just by doing a drag & drop of the user controls we need, and just a simple configuration after that, with previous versions it was much more complicated.

An example of this, let’s talk about adding a Drop Down menu, or trying to open a popup window, or having a webpanel to be displayed only with a mouse over. All this things and much more can be done with GeneXus 9.0, but not in a simple way, to do it in Gx 9.0, we must do the following...

· add a textblock to the webpanel

· change the format property to HTML

· add in the start event a textblock.visible = 0

· and finally add to the caption of the textblock all the JavaScript code

I remember adding the JSCookMenu to an application I developed about two years ago, and it took me an entire week to have the menu running. So I tried the exact same thing with GeneXus X Ev1 and it took me only less then a day, to have the same menu up and running, and all I had to do was drag & drop the JSCookMenu User Control, load a Data Provider, and I was Smiling. So now in GeneXus Ev1 we have lots of user controls, that we can add to our applications, without having to learn another development language (JavaScript).

So my personal recommendation is, if you can move to GeneXus X Ev1, do it ASAP, you will have no regrets and be a ton more productive! As usual KB conversion are sometimes difficult and can be complicated, but in the end you will be much happier, and if you are planning to start any new development of a web application even better.