Farata Systems      

This is called The Instinct Java Developer Contest. Actually, the first prize is $20K + up to $5K as free membership (?!) in the developer’s program. Details are here.

This sweet deal was backed by Sprint that’s promotes Samsung’s Instinct phone. I can’t recall AT&T offering money to develop programs for iPhone. But that’s fine – iPhone has been closed for developers till this Spring.

K Sparks K Step K Young

Not that I need those bloody $20K + up to $5K as free membership, but it got me interested – I wanted to look at the phone.
Apparently Sprint needs some help not only with Java programming, but they need Flash developers too, and they need them badly.

Sprint’s Web page contains the link to their preview Web page of Samsung Instinct. I clicked on that link, and the process of downloading SWF for Flash Player successfully started. I’ve been watching percentages 43% …44%…45% for about minute(!) to see the main page with the menu. Yes, my Internet connection was slow at that time – 350Kbps for downloads. But there is lot and lots of people who are sitting by the slow wires.

Decided to do a little more research – this site downloads about 2.5MB worth of files just to show the first page. No wonder it’s slow.

Then, I clicked on the menu item About The Phone. This menu Item returned back several thumbnail images, which was yet another menu. This time I was watching the message “Buffering” for yet another minute.

This is a good example of bad RIA practice. Developing Intranet applications for the users sitting behind the bars within the confines of the enterprise at 20-30Mbps is easy. But this is not an Intranet, this is consumer facing application, which is completely different ball game. People do have slow Internet, and you don’t want to lose them – they can be potential customers of your business.

For comparison, visit the original Samsung Instinct page. It’s blazingly fast, but it’s not RIA. But it’s blazingly fast.

I just got off the project where I was helping with design and development of a large and fancy consumer RIA Web site for a major car manufacturer. This site was created with Adobe Flex with lots of nice effects and animations too. We spent some time to re-factor and fine tune the code and were able to bring the size of the initial Web page from 4MB to 1MB. The speed of the first Web page appearance is crucial for RIA.

One of the chapters of our upcoming book “Enterprise Flex. Best Practices” is called “Performance Considerations”. In this chapter we’ll talk about actual vs. perceived performance improvements and various techniques of dividing the project into a set of loosely coupled modules and libraries, which besides minimizing the size of the downloadable code chunks helps in splitting the work between different developers working on the project.

Coming back to that phone Web page… I watched a 30-sec commercial showed Instinct and iPhone side by side. The message on the iPhone reads “Cannot Connect”, then surprised voice asks, “Cannot connect?” This video ends with the “Instinct wins!” screen.

No comment.

I believe that many people will become irritated while trying to learn about Samsung Instinct via this Sprint Web page. This site is a great example of how to damage a product by engaging rookie RIA developers and screenplay writers. If Sprint had some political reasons of sabotaging Samsung Instinct sales, they did a great job.

Yakov Fain

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I’ll be speaking at the SOAWorld conference in NYC this Monday on using rich Internet applications as service consumers in SOA architecture.

As a speaker, I can invite a small number of people to attend it for free (Golden Pass). Just use the coupon code speakerguestVIP (it’s case sensitive) on the following registration page.

If you have any RIA-related questions, just stop by and let’s talk. I’ll be wearing jeans and black t-shirt with white lettering FARATA.

See you on Monday.

Yakov

Due to multiple requests for public training we’ve announced two more Flex training classes.

One day hands-on “Intro to Adobe Cairngorm” will take place on July 21 in New York City. Curriculum for this course has been developed by Adobe, but we’ve added one more unit to it – “Comparison of Flex Frameworks”.

Adobe Certified Flex 3 public training will take place in San Francisco on the week of August 3. This is a great way to prepare for the 360Flex conference that will also run in August in San Jose.
One more reminder. The early bird discount for the July’s online instructor-led training expires tomorrow.

See you in class.
Yakov Fain

I’m writing a chapter for our new book called “Enterprise Flex: Best Practices”. I’m happy to announce that the band players remain the same. I’ll keep making the noise on the drums, Anatole plays base, and Victor is our rhythm section.

Each of us initially writes a number of chapters and then submits it to the other two co-authors who are always happy to explain why this material can never be published in its current form. By the time each chapter is submitted to the publisher’s technical editors, it’s been re-written at least twice.

My first chapter is called “Comparison of Flex frameworks”.  I’m reviewing and comparing four out of twelve (!) Flex frameworks: Cairngorm, PureMVC, Mate, and Clear.  I’m sure many of you have heard about the first three. The last one, Clear is our own baby that was quietly born two years ago. Even though we did not bother giving it a name, we’ve been improving this component library while using it in our consulting projects.  Finally, we are documenting and refactoring the code so other Flex developers can use it too.

To simplify comparison of the frameworks, we  start with the original Cairngorm’s Café Townsend sample application, explain it and then re-writing it using PureMVC, Mate and Clear providing explanation of the code and principles of each framework.

The entire book will be written by March of 2009, but the publisher will make individual chapters  available online as they’re ready. During the entire process of writing the book we’ll be blogging sharing with you our little discoveries and asking your feedback and here’s the first question.

Do you think that this Cairngorm diagram is easy to understand or the one published at the cairngormdocs.org is better?

Thanks,
Yakov

I’ve got an email stating that AOL finally abandoned the ugly Java applet that was used in the ICQ2Go , the Web version of hugely popular (about 30M users) instant messaging system. The person who sent me this email also wrote, “IMO this was the last popular Java applet. Now the king is dead.”
I don’t think so.

It became a trend to criticize Java for slow starting VM, overly complex syntax, ugly-looking UI, installation problems, lots of boilerplate code and more. Some people just pronounce Java dead.
Not so fast. There is no money for the funeral.
While lots of new applications will be created by polyglot programmers, there is a huge base of Java-based production code that millions of businesses and individuals rely on.

ICQ2Go is an excellent example of a popular consumer facing application. Let’s read a couple of fresh messages from its users’ forum:

“Where has the bloody Java based ICQ2Go gone? That’s the only one I can use in my work! Heeeeelp !!!”
“Bring back Java ICQ2GO! This buggy Flash ICQ with a stupid design and without proper encoding support is a total rubbish!”

Of course, AOL will fix the bugs at some point, but experience of the ICQ2Go users will be repeated across all applications that will move from Java to Flash-based runtime. Don’t be in a hurry while migrating from Java to Flex/Flash. Take your time. Plan carefully and test thoroughly.

Now let’s talk about success of Adobe Flex. Who do you think would know about Flex if there were no millions of rock-solid enterprise Java applications? Just a small group of enthusiasts creating cool little gadgets for fun.

“Have you seen that cool little video player number 237?”
“ Have you seen that new photo album written in Flex? No, the one that was published this week?”
“I’ve seen it, but mine written in pure ActionScript without using Flex framework is five times smaller”.
It’s because of the enterprise server-side Java very demanding Wall Street, telecommunications, manufacturing applications started to use Flex. It’s because of its fast communication protocols Flex is considered for lots of commercial Java-based business applications. No offence, PHP, Ruby, .Net, Python,SOAP and Coldfusion folks.

Flex has entered the enterprise world, and if you are just considering using it for your next business application, attend this one day technical event called Enterprise Flex Symposium and meet other practitioners who’ve done it already.

Ironically, it’s Sun Microsystems who introduced rich Internet applications back in 1995. But now, after spending more than a decade in the RIA coma, they are doing baby steps into the world of RIA with JavaFX. Even though Sun’s moving slow, the need for RIA offering has already positive effect on Java – the new JVM to play JavaFX becomes a lot smaller (Java Kernel) and it will be browser independent (kill the browser, but JVM will keep running).
Today, there is only one API for creating production grade front end for RIA talking to Java. It’s called Adobe Flex. In 2010, JavaFX may become another alternative. But meanwhile, please stop bashing Java. Do not forget that many of these new popular programming languages exist because there is a J2EE application they need to connect to. Do not forget that Java puts bread on the tables of many people (including mine) around the world. Do not spit in the well you drink from.

Yakov Fain

Attend this full day technical symposium. Meet with Flex practitioners, and get ready to build your enterprise rich Internet application right the first time. Register today at nominal rate.  Details at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/126384018

While attending a conference in India last month, many people asked me if we offer online Flex training. Answering these and other requests, we’ve scheduled a week of live instructor-led online class. Students can be located anywhere in the world as long as they are connected to the Internet.

During the class, each registered student will be using a screen-sharing tool for visuals and a free phone line for audio (non US-based students will have to use Skype).  During the lecture part, students will watch the monitor of the instructor, and during the hands-on part instructor can quickly switch mode to see the screen of the student who needs help.  Students can also ask questions using online chat room.

This will be a small class (not more than 10 people). See details at www.faratasystems.com

Yakov Fain

Keynotes are often boring, but watching today’s keynote from WWDC conference was better than the movie “Sex and the City”  that I’ve enjoyed last week in the theater near me. I do not want to repeat the facts about iPhone 3G. I’ll buy a couple of them this summer. I do not want to bore you with the facts about the countless possibilities that open iPhone SDK brings to the table. Just watch the keynote.

While we’ve been writing articles comparing RIA technologies, Steve Jobs locked the iPhone team in  the underground bunker, they’ve been working hard and delivered. Big time.

During the last fifteen years, excitement in the software development was slowly moving from Microsoft to Sun Microsystems, then to Google and now it has arrived to the new destination – Apple’s iPhone.

People will enjoy developing applications for iPhone, and this device will spread around the world at the speed of sound. Sure thing, Japan has some super phones, but people there use not more than 5-10% of their abilities. Sure thing, Java ME has to solve a lot more complicated task of offering tools for developers dealing with hundreds of different phones, while Apple has a luxury to have just one phone device, just one OS, and they are the same. Who cares? If this phone is the best and the OS is great too, why bother looking somewhere else?

We are talking about advantages of the RIA platform that use Flash Player as a runtime, but if Adobe won’t find a way to put the player on iPhone, they’ll lose lots and lots of customers. Of course, just having open iPhone SDK is not enough for  porting Flash Player to iPhone, but there should be a way to find the key to Steve’s heart. Sun Microsystems should dig in the same direction.

Enough said, just get some popcorn and watch the Apple’s keynote  at http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/0806wdt546x/event/index.html .

Yakov Fain

I’ll be teaching a week of Adobe Flex public training in Atlanta, GA in July. Details at faratasystems.com. I’d like to run two more such trainings this year. Go to phorum boardPlease suggest a city – can be anywhere in the world.

Regards,
Yakov Fain