Migration from WebGui to Wisej

[itg-assistant]

Rui Oliveira asked 2016-11-01 09:44:11 UTC

Did you have some step by step procedure to migrate code from WebGui to Wisej?

Thanks & regards,

Rui

[itg-assistant]

Frank (ITG) answered 2016-11-01 10:02:59 UTC

Hi Rui,

We will soon publish a simple guide with the basic steps and what to check for: WinForms to Wisej and VWG to Wisej.

There is also a tool that we mentioned in another answer. It is developed and used by fecher LLC  (our service partner and sister company) and it’s used on migration projects – it’s not meant for redistribution at the moment.

If you are interested in their services, I can bring you in contact.

Best regards
Frank

[itg-assistant]

Rui Oliveira answered 2016-11-01 12:03:36 UTC

The step by step from VWG to Wisej will be great. Namely, a list of unsupported controls entirely or partially.

I am an old VWG user and I am seeing a long and painful migration process from VWG. Mainly because a product as recent as the Wisej, must have a lot of small issues to stabilize until the product becomes mature and stable to be used in real live applications (I remember that this evolutionary process have been  long and painful with VWG, and when finally start being usable the company closes).

No seriousness by the Gizmox the way they close the door and left all users/developers orphan. The only serious way in a situation like this is to make all code available for the users. But ok, this is another story and I am crossing fingers that with Wisej will be different.

Thanks & regards,

Rui

[itg-assistant]

Tiago (ITG) answered 2016-11-01 12:48:41 UTC

Hi Rui,

a lot of small issues to stabilize until the product becomes mature and stable to be used in real live applications (I remember that this evolutionary process have been  long and painful with VWG, and when finally start being usable the company closes).

I agree 100%. The first usable version of VWG was version 7 and soon after they went free and closed the door.

Why I'm not too worried about Wisej maturity? While VWG did everything from the ground up, Wisej is built on top of solid components.

VWG took a very long road of recreating System.Windows.Forms namespace. This is a very hard job that requires an enormous amount of effort. It needs a large team or a long time. Note the Mono version of Windows Forms isn't as mature as VWG.

Wisej took a different path. Wisej extends System.Windows.Forms, meaning some basic features are already there, namely DataBinding.

WVG did their own Javascript components. Wisej uses Qooxdoo and extends the widgets only when needed.

As you can see, the amount of work needed to get the product stable is quite different.

WVG lost momentum because of the enormous time it took to release a stable product. Gizmox lost a lot of customers while it was stabilizing the product.

As I understand, Wisej prefers to release a stable product with missing features. The included features are stable: you can use them and trust they do whatever they are supposed to do. Later releases will be feature complete. As I said, I don't expect Wisej to take too long to release a feature complete product.

This strategy is important as it's quite difficult to write a migration application, because we don't know exactly what are the properties that Wisej implements and the ones it doesn't. Anyway the end result of the application will be a designer file that builds. Most of the time it won't need further changes, but sometimes it will need fixes.

One of the biggest WinForms to VWG migration issues was the asynchronous MessageBox. (I'm facing this problem again on Xamarin/Android). The problem was solved on VWG 7. Wisej doesn't have this problem so migration from WinForms should be a lot easier.

[itg-assistant]

Luca answered 2016-11-01 16:25:08 UTC

Hi,

I'd like to add to Tiago's reply that we are on the same boat in terms of VWG projects. We have several large projects in production or close to production based on a build of VWG that we have painfully fixed over the years. We started planning, trying, testing (and throwing away code) to replace VWG two+ years ago. This is to say that we need Wisej in our projects as well. Our migration services is already using it to replace VWG projects so we basically will have the same issues as all the VWG developers that decide to try Wisej.

Best,
Luca