Farata Systems      

In this 10 minute audio podcast I’ll go over the upcoming Intro and Advanced Flex training public events.

You can get the mp3 file at http://myflex.org/yf/audio/faratatraining1.mp3.

These are the links to the registration pages:

1. Advanced Flex in London : http://www.eventbrite.com/event/355598605

2. Real-World Flex in Atlanta: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/410013361

3. 360 Max proposals: http://bit.ly/zDytj

4. Online Live Intro to Flex: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/414974199

Yakov Fain

I’ve recorded a short conversation with Niel Reuben who was kind enough to share his experience of developing data-driven Flex/Java applications using Clear Data Builder component developed by Farata Systems.

The audio recording is here: http://myflex.org/demos/Niel_on_CDB.mp3

The Clear Toolkit, its source code and documentation can be downloaded from SourceForge  at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/

Yakov Fain

First of all, to add a little more credibility to what I’m about to write, let me just say that I’m running Princeton Java Users Group (JUG) for years and have a pretty good idea of how organization of the meetings and sponsorship work in such gatherings.
Java community is huge, well established and has a loyal following of leaders and enthusiasts that are willing to spend some of their evenings meeting with their peers and attending presentations by either well known or by no so famous yet presenters.

As a leader of this JUG I often receive emails asking to promote among our members a commercial training event. I do it on one condition: our JUG members have to get some additional benefits from such a vendor, for example, discounted price, free speakers coming over to our JUG, free software licenses…something.

During the last several years, I spent a substantial portion of my time working with Adobe Flex and often fly with my colleagues around the world running either commercial training sessions on behalf of our company or just speaking at the user groups or technical conferences.
While promoting our events I started approaching the leaders of the local Flex/Flash user groups asking them to spread the word about our training session and/or offering to present at their user groups while I’m in town.

To my surprise, pretty often they either just ignore such offers or give a polite response with some lame excuse for not doing this.  Things started to clear up when at one city I was allowed to talk, but was asked not to promote our Flex training because the company that provided the room and pizza was running their own training classes in Flex and were afraid of competition. No problem. Sounds fair.

One of the Flex user group leaders never responds to such offers. Ever. And I tried it multiple times.

In one city, I didn’t get any response to my first email, sent another one and the leaders of that group got back to me – thank you for the offer to speak at our UG, but we are not running any sessions during summer. Fine. You didn’t want me to deliver a technical presentation for free, but why not spreading the word about our technical training and offer a discount to their membership? When we were running the training class in that city, one of the attendees explained me the reason – the local Flex UG is being run by a consulting company that offers Flex services and doesn’t want to allow any competition in the Flex space.

The recent response from yet another UG was very upbeat: thanks for this great offer, we’ll post the information about your event on our Web site. Needless to say that it never happened…

The Web sites of some of the Flex/Flash users groups don’t even provide contact information and the comments to their posts are closed.

It seems to be a trend. This leaves a bitter taste in my mouth given the fact that I often get emails from Flex developers from around the country asking if our company is planning to run a training event in their town. Our events are pure technical, we are happy to share with you pretty advanced tricks and techniques learned while developing our open source projects of during work on real-world projects. We don’t sell anything during these events, and typically, the tuition just barely covers our expenses. Guys, we don’t mind flying to your city, but please talk to your Flex/Flash UG leaders to open their doors.

We’ll keep running our advanced Flex training events anyway. Let’s see if the local Flex User Groups will cooperate in spreading the word about our upcoming training sessions in London (enter the code FLUG at the registration page to get £150 off the tuition) and Atlanta.

Yakov Fain

When a couple of months back I told a fellow Flex developer that I’ll be speaking at CFUnited, conference he shrugged, “Why ColdFusion?”

Little did he know that CFUnited is branded as a ColdFusion, Flex and AIR conference. And this was true – there were lots of quality presentations on Flex and AIR here.

The venue selection was superb – a golf resort in Virginia with three swimming pools and helpful staff.

ColdFusion conference was a new crowd for me, really. People are friendly, and you get a feeling of a small community where people know each other. Finally, I found a technical event with lots of female software developers.

For some reason, ColdFusion developers try to maintain the status of endangered species. Did they learn it from PowerBuilder or Cobol folks? Why would an easy to use server side tool extinct?

If you think I’m making things up, how do you like the masochist title of a general session “CF is Dead…Long Live CF!” Apparently the rumors about this possible death were taken seriously by developers of Indian descent. Most of them jumped the ColdFusion ship. Can’t recall attending an Indianless IT conference for years.

Instead of attending this funeral I decided to spend this hour laying by the pool in my bathing suit. The tanning session was followed by an excellent lunch at the resort’s restaurant, after which I returned back to the classrooms.

Flex for UI and ColdFusion for the server should be a very appealing and productive combination for many business applications. Besides, both product come from Adobe. Flex is like an injection of a fresh and young blood (not Botox) to the ColdFusion community. Flex will revitalize and make them stronger.

This was my first time at CFUnited, and about a month ago I’ve contacted Liz Frederick, a real pro event organizer who put this great show together, asking if I should replace my advanced level preso with a more basic one. Liz checked the number of people signed-up for this talk and decided to stick to the original topic – design patterns in Flex, which was the right decision as my talk was well attended.

If you have any doubts regarding the caliber of Flex presenters, let me just give you some names that are well known in Flex community: Andy Powell, Doug McCune, Ryan Stewart, Jeff Tapper, Tom Gonzales, David Tucker, RJ Owen…

Chatted with Christophe, yes Coenraets on new features of LCDS 3.0. He presented the new features of the product – this time Adobe is making a serious move towards Model-Driven development, and Christophe’s demo looked promising. Expect more reasonable LCDS pricing too. Look for the fresh build of betas of LCDS and Flash Builder 4 next week.

All these people were friendly and very approachable (you’d better be… standing by the pool with a beer or a glass of wine). To make you even more jealous, Adobe pool party included the Sumo wrestling competition. I know who won the Ryan vs. Doug fight, but you don’t.

Food here was as good as on day one of MAX’08, but here it’s consistently good. Once in a while I’m running public training events for our company, Farata Systems, and get used to paying (with tears in my eyes) $40 per person for a boxed lunch. Here we’ve had gourmet food (wild salmon, flanked steak, creme brule…). I hope people could appreciate that event organizers didn’t try to cut corners squeezing out maximum profits from this event.

Oh, by the way, you won’t believe me, but Wi-Fi connection was working ALL THE TIME during the entire event. No kidding!

To summarize, I’m glad that I was invited to this event and looking forward to see all ColdFusion developers healthy and wealthy at CFUnited 2010.

Flex framework includes a pretty useful object that deserves more attention: mx.util.ObjectProxy. You can wrap your object (i.e. Person)  into this proxy which will obediently report on all changes that are happening to this instance of a person.

If you subclass ObjectProxy, you can even add a new  behavior to the wrapped object without touching a single line of its code.

I’ve recorded a short video showing a couple of examples of using proxies in Flex.

This is one of many tricks and techniques that consultants from Farata Systems use while working on enterprise Flex projects, and we’ll continue to share them with you in the form of such mini demos as well as in one of our public seminars like the one on September 24-25 in London, UK (use ebd discount code to get the early bird price) or on October 30 in Atlanta, GA.

For up-to-date schedule of advanced Flex seminars see the section Training  at http://www.faratasystems.com.

Yakov Fain

Don’t create new singletons – just use what you already have.

Each real-world software developer knows at least one design pattern – Singleton. Flex has some specifics in implementing Singletons due to lack of private constructors in ActionScript, but the goal of this little writeup is not to show you how to implement Singleton, but rather to discourage you from doing this because each Flex application already has a singleton – just use it.

I’ve recorded an eight-minute video that will shows how you can use the Application object as your one and only singleton when needed. See if you can answer the question that I asked at the end of the video.

This is one of many tricks and techniques that consultants from Farata Systems use while working on enterprise Flex projects, and we’ll continue to share them with you in the form of such mini demos as well as in one of our public seminars like the one on August 7 in New York City or on September 24-25 in London, UK.

Yakov Fain