Farata Systems      

Yesterday, my colleague and I received notifications from Adobe MAX organizers that started with words “We regret to inform you…we were forced to make difficult decisions, which topics would be of most interest to our attendees”.

The following three out of five submitted proposals were rejected:
1.    Flex Design Patterns that Make Sense
2.    Occasionally-Connected applications with AIR and  BlazeDS
3.    Partitioning Flex Enterprise Applications

At this time, we haven’t received the responses for two more submissions:

1. Starting new Enterprise Flex Project
2. Improving Performance in Flex applications

None of these presentations is about marketecture – just heavy duty technical stuff from people who are actually using Flex in the real-world projects.

Of course, MAX organizers had to make difficult decisions. Of course, they wanted to ensure that engineers from Adobe could share with the Flex crowd the latest solutions and techniques.  I don’t have a quarrel with that. But don’t they think that people who paid thousands of dollars to attend this interesting event were entitled to hear some advanced stuff from practitioners? Apparently not. Expect to see 100-level talks like “How to use Flex Builder debugger” or “FlexUnit Crash Course”.

I want to make myself clear – I’m not complaining. Adobe can run their shows the way they want. It was my fault – I made the wrong assumptions expecting to see a selection process similar to JavaOne, where plenty of non-Sun employees get a chance to have a shot based on the technical merits of their presentation proposals.

No biggies. Now I know that it’s Adobe’s show, and I won’t bother with paper submissions in the future.
What’s left? It’s elementary, Watson! We’ll keep running our small-scale seminars and symposiums for those who want to learn from our experience and share theirs.

Having said that, here’s the three upcoming events that we’ve scheduled:
1.    Second Annual Enterprise Flex Symposium, August 7, New York City: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/355645746 . We haven’t published session descriptions yet, but expect to see most of the rejected by MAX presentations and more. If you’d like to present at this technical  no-fluff  event, please send me an email at yfain at faratasystems.com

2.     Advanced Flex 2-day workshop in Toronto, Canada is scheduled for July 23—24. Details at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/353452185

3.    Advanced Flex 2-day workshop in London, UK is scheduled for September 24—25: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/355598605.

Besides these events, I’ll make a presentation on occasionally connected AIR applications at AJAXWorld in New York City on June 23 http://ajaxworld.com/event/session/469 , and on design patterns that make sense at CFUnited in Virginia on August 14: http://cfunited.com/2009/schedule.

I also try to do my best to attend 360flex conferences made by developers and for developers http://www.360flex.com/ .

Yours truly,
Yakov Fain

This advanced Flex workshop has been very well received in New York City and Boston. The next destinations are Toronto (July) and London (September).  These are some of the topics covered during these two days of immersion into the Flex and AIR world:

- Data binding and MVC under the hood
- Custom component life cycle
- Selected Design Patterns in Flex
- What are the options in linking Flex libraries to minimize the size of your application?
- Minimizing the  download time of your Flex application (perceived and real)
-Pros and Cons of various methods of accessing the server tier

- Comparing LiveCycle Data Services and BlazeDS
- Basics of  creating custom communication protocol adapters for BlazeDS/LCDS
- Making Flex messaging shine
- Server side push to Flex Clients in BlazeDS
- Data Synchronization with LCDS and BlazeDS
- How to staff Flex projects
- Comparing MVC Architectural Flex Frameworks( Cairngorm, Mate, PureMVC)
- Overview of Clear Toolkit (Log4Fx, Fx2Ant, Clear Data Builder, DTO2Fx)
-Application builds and continuous integration
-Reverse RPC – a Java application server calls the Flex client
- Peer-to-peer remoting (a client calls a function on another client)
-Modularization of Flex applications with modules and sub-applications
- Flex Portals
- Occasionally Connected Applications with Adobe AIR BlazeDS
-Testing tools Flex applications
-Dealing with memory leaks in Flex applications
-Challenges of printing from Flash Player
-PDF generation on the client
-Open table discussion: real-world challenges and success stories of the workshop participants

FAQ

What’s the size of the class?
Under 20 people

Is this a hands-on class?
No. It’s not possible to cover all these topics during two days in a hands-on set up. It’s a mix of lectures, live demos and code reviews

Do you provide any materials for the attendees?
Yes, Each attendee receives the hard and soft copy of all slides. We also provide the source code of all examples used during this workshop

Is it even possible to cover all this material in two days?
You won’t become an expert in these topics, but at least will get a good grasp of important concepts that will save you tons of time and efforts while working on your project. Based on the feedback from people who attended these seminars in the past, each person finds some solutions he’s been looking for to apply in his project.

What are the prerequisites for attending this seminar?
Having a hands-on experience with Flex  is a must. Basic understanding of Java also helps.

Do you teach this seminar privately on-site?
Yes, we teach this seminar world-wide. Please send an email to yfain at faratasystems.com if you’d like to make arrangements.

Is there any other any other workshop that  has similar curriculum?
No

Yakov Fain

8:20AM.

Was reading today’s schedule at one of the posters at 360flex conference.
A guy nearby said, “Highly recommend the talk ‘Caching and Synchronization in Flex’”.
“Are you the speaker?”
“Yes”.
I’m in.

8:25AM.

360Flex. Tuesday morning
-Hey, Yakov!
-Hi, Christophe! I really enjoyed your talk yesterday on the new Flex/Spring integration. In general, I’m not into frameworks, but this time just using the parts of Spring like adding a security piece makes sense.
-That’s right, and it’s not intrusive at all. Just use the module that you need. Is your talk later today?
-No, it’s tomorrow. “Flex Design Patterns  that Make Sense”
-Is it controversial? Are you planning to pick up a fight?
-As usual .  I’m not a politically correct person.

Yakov Fain

Adobe AIR is cool because

1. AIR allows you to perform all I/O operation with the file system on the user’s desktop.
2. AIR allows you to sign applications and version application.
3. AIR offers an updater to ensure proper upgrades of the applications on the user’s desktop
4. AIR comes with a local database SQLite to keep the data (in clear or encrypted mode) right on the user’s computer
5. AIR applications can monitor and report the status of the network connection
6. You can start and run AIR application even when there is not network connection available
7. AIR has better than Flex support of HTML – creating a custom Web Browser is easy

Adobe AIR is not cool because

1. AIR can’t make calls to user’s native operation system.
2. AIR can’t launch non-AIR applications on the desktop (except the default browser).
3. AIR can’t instantiate a DLL.
4. AIR can’t call an ActiveX component since AIR application are not running in a Web browser.
5. AIR can’t directly access ports (i.e. USB or serial) of the user’s computer.

Clear Toolkit is cool because

It includes an ActionScript component OfflineDataCollection that allows you to program local/remote data synchronization.

Open source Clear Toolkit framework is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/

The source code of the OfflineDataCollection is here: http://tinyurl.com/p23do5

A demo recording of the sample occasionally-connected AIR application is here: http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=394.

To see the demo in person, come to my talk at AjaxWorld in New York City in June.

Yakov Fain

Next week, we are running a two-day Flex seminar in Boston. This is one of a kind public event that’s not offered by anyone else. Here’s what makes this event special:

1.    It covers a carefully selected set of topics that are a must to know for anyone responsible of the success of an enterprise Flex project.

2.    The curriculum has been created by practitioners working on real-world Flex/Java enterprise project during the last 3.5 years.

3.    This seminar is delivered by top-notch Flex professionals, certified Adobe Flex instructors and book authors Yakov Fain and Dr. Victor Rasputnis.

4.    This is a small-size event and each of you will have a chance to discuss things that bother you in your current Flex project. We don’t promise and immediate solution, but you can count on getting an honest opinion of an expert in this field.

5.    If you already completed any other training or played with Flex on your own, this seminar is a good next step in your education.

6.    We usually teach this seminar for our private enterprise customers, and we are planning to teach it publicly only one more time this year.

7.    The format of the seminar is a mix of lectures, code reviews and demos. Each participant will receive all the presentation materials used during the seminar.

8.    Last time, Torbjörn Nodin flew to the US all the way from Sweden just to attend this event. This is what he wrote afterward:

“If you are considering RIA – be there! If you are considering Silverlight – be there! If you are considering Flex – be there! Even if you have to fly 10h over sea – be there! I did, and it was worth it all.”

This time we’ll have one attendee coming from Great Britain.

And all this for less than $600 – readers of this blog get $100 off the price by entering discount code crisisdiscount (for new registrations only).

You still have a couple of more days to decide and book your flight to Boston. For more details and registration visit this Web page: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/295389518 .

Here’s an excerpt from chapter 3 of our upcoming O’Reilly book “Enterprise Development with Flex”: http://tinyurl.com/qu5dac

The chapter uses components from the open source component library clear.swc, which is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/ . Although this library is included in the Clear Toolkit, you can download just the clear.swc alone.