Gizmox, creator of the Visual WebGui platform that migrates applications from the desktop to the Web, is making available today a preview of Visual WebGui Enterprise Mobile to help .NET developers extend applications into the post-PC era of mobile phones, tablets and cloud.
Navot Peled, CEO of Gizmox, said there are 60 billion Microsoft-based lines of code in the world written by legions of developers with classic .NET skills, and as the industry shifts from the Silverlight plug-in to HTML5, he pointed out there hasn’t been a dedicated HTML5 enterprise framework.
Visual WebGui Enterprise Mobile can transpose code from a desktop application to a Web app or mobile app with adjustments for form factor, he said. Visual WebGui Enterprise Mobile includes the Gizmox conversion engine, a mapping studio integrated with Visual Studio, and a drag-and-drop designer for forms and themes.
Due to Visual WebGui’s transfer architecture, which uses metadata communication to render the UI on the browser, Peled said, “The front end is virtually unhackable” and requires much less bandwidth than Web applications typically use. Applications are secure by design, he said, because applications run on the server behind the firewall.
A strategic relationship with Microsoft will result in a solution coming in the next few months for migrating applications from the desktop into the Windows Azure cloud. Another partnership (with Citrix) will result in Visual WebGui leaving PhoneGap for a Citrix infrastructure to tap into mobile devices’ resources.
Moving forward, Peled said users will be able to run Visual WebGui applications offline using local device storage, and for developers, it will come with better HTML5-enhanced controls and an HTML5 designer.
Visual WebGui will also support Windows 8, as Peled explained that Microsoft has embedded a browser into the operating system, so “it’s natural for us to support the Metro UI. It’s just another mapping.”
