Farata Systems      

Three years ago, I was calculating the cost of attending JavaOne conference: http://java.sys-con.com/node/187608.  Thanks to crisis, the conferences got cheaper, but still are not affordable for many software developers.  I’d like to offer you a legal way to get more than 80% off the registration price at Adobe MAX that will take place next week in Los Angeles. But you have to move fast! It’s easy:

1. Today: enroll into a cheapest class in your local community college to get a student ID.

2. Tomorrow: register for Adobe Max for $199 at the following Web page: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/edu/max2009/.

3. Sunday: arrive to LA.

4. Find me at the conference (I’m nice looking and friendly guy wearing black T-Shirt with white letters FARATA) and say, “Thank you, Yakov for saving me about $1200!”. You can easily find me at 12:30PM on Monday at the Community Pavilion where I’ll be hosting a BOF “Enterprise Development with Flex”.

Sorry, Adobe. Please don’t invalidate my pass for sharing this little trick.

Yakov Fain

After running with my colleague Victor an advanced Flex training in London,  we kept asking ourselves, “Why we liked it better than many of similar events from the past?” No, it’s not because London is a nice city to visit. It’s not because you hear dear and darling all the time. The reason is simple – this was the strongest (from the skill set perspective group we’ve ever had).  Go Europe, go! Besides people from UK, we’ve had attendees from Holland, Belgium, Norway and even one person (very strong) from South Africa. Does it mean that European Flex developers are better than American one?

As usual, there was one 90-minute section with a detailed comparison of Flex MVC frameworks.  As usual, I was softly criticizing the use of MVC framework in Flex.  Yes, I can admit that if you are dealing with low-skilled developers you may justify using Cairngorm. IMHO, Mate seems to be less intrusive to your project.  No, I didn’t have a chance to look closely into SWIZ – attending one presentation is not enough for forming an opinion.  PureMVC is over-engineered…

I try to go easy on frameworks in the classroom, because there could be lots of non-technical reasons for adopting this or that framework.   I also know that people who created frameworks are seasoned developers with their vision of how things should be done. No disrespect here. But if they have their vision and are not afraid to promote, I am entitled to have mine, don’t I, darling?
Since we are not in the classroom now, let me use a bit stronger language. If to make a call to a server and display a piece of data on the screen you are using Flex implementations of Façade, Command, Delegate, Proxy, Services, Mediator (which is divided into main and secondary ones), and all these objects have to be properly registered or else….you are nuts. The only excuse I can accept, if you are not a decision maker, and this “architecture” have been forced by another developer. In this case s/he is nuts.

If you are a consultant and suggest such complex but theoretically correct architecture to your customer, I understand (but not approve) your goals  – to keep yourself billable on this project for as long as possible.
If you have a minute, read an article by Joel Spolsky about duck tape programmers. Joel is talking about other than Flex technologies, but it resonates with what I keep promoting for the last 3+ years in Flex community – keep it simple, don’t over-architect your project, be agile, components vs. frameworks. I didn’t hear the term “duck tape programmer” before, but if this means implementing simple solution to deliver the project on time – I’m all for it.

But if being a duck tape programmer can be a good thing, during the last ten years I see a new breed of developers that I call “Google programmer”. No, I’m not talking about people who work for this company. I talk about people whose education consists of googling for code fragments on the as needed basis.  One attendee  stated that he was really surprised when we showed a wealth of information that can be revealed by using the Flex compiler’s option –keep. We’ve been using this option quite a lot to understand what’s under the hood, have you?

Why was -keep such a revelation to this senior developer? Is it because reading program documentation or books on software  is out of fashion in the 21st century?   Googling for the code samples can help when you know what are you looking for. But this –keep is a very good example of what would never be returned by Google unless you specifically ask “How to examine ActionScript code generated by Flex compiler?” Have you ever bothered asking such question?

Each of us, regardless of how senior we think we are, has islands (and gaps) of knowledge and reading books and attending formal training is like a SPA treatment for our minds. That’s why I’m very exited to spending several days in the training rooms at Adobe MAX conference, where I’ll be studying hard new tools and techniques of software development and architecture. Many great developers that will attend this event will definitely give me a new perspective to “obvious things”, and maybe  there is another secret key besides the –keep that will help me in some way  to be more productive and efficient at work.

This year I go there with Victor Rasputnis and Anatole Tartakovsky, and each of us is eager to learn from others and share what we know.

See you at MAX,
Yakov Fain

In ten days I’ll be sitting at the general session at Adobe MAX 09 in LA.  People from Adobe will come up on stage one after another delivering the latest news on the products we all use daily. Here’s my short wish list of the news I’d like to hear:

1.    Flash Player will become available on iPhone at so-and-so date. A year ago I’ve been hearing hints and vague promises that this is in the works. A year later – nothing happened.   It’s great that Flash Player is installed on each desktop connected to the Internet, but this doesn’t cut it any longer. Last year Adobe announced the motto “Mobile first” and it’s time to put the money where their mouth is.

2.    LiveCycle Data Services. If Adobe won’t substantially lower the prices, I feel sorry for their salesmen who try to sell LCDS to the enterprises. Five thousand per CPU for the enterprise edition seems to be a reasonable price for the features it provides comparing to free BlazeDS.

3.    Adobe AIR.  It’s time to let it behave as a full fledged desktop development platform. Allow AIR to start other applications, let it access ports on the user’s machine. Stop being a little pregnant.

4.    Flash Catalyst. This product is being developed for more than two years and I still have hard time trying to understan how it’s useful in the enterprise world. Sure enough, you can use it for a quick prototype, but there are other simple tools that can be used for wireframing and prototyping.  I want to hear at least a promise (with a deadline) of something useful for the real world. Of course, I’m talking about round-trip scenarios when a developer can refactor generated code, and later on, the designer should be able to load this code into Flash Catalyst, make some changes and regenerate the code again without messing up developer’s code. I also want to see how an enterprise project can be started without the need for the developers to wait until the designer’s ready with his/her FXG file.

5.    Flash Builder. The gap between releases of Flex Busined 3 and Flash Builder 4 is getting too wide. I understand, that this serious redesign is caused by introduction of Flash Catalist and by new component skinning architecture, but I want to see some real improvements in performance of Flash Builder 4, which won’t be available till late February of 2010.  I also want to see substantially smaller SWF/SWC files generated by Flex compiler. Modularization and framework caching is OK, but not enough. I want more good news from this department.

6.    The startup of the Flash Player and with the minimal Flex objects (i.e. SystemManager) takes too much time. Even with the use of preloaders with light Flash-only pages, I can’t promise my customers that I’ll be able to design a Flex application that will show the first (any) view of their RIA in less than 2 seconds. Too bad.

7.    I’m really interested to see how this new Flash Platform Distribution Services will pick up in the real world. Will its revenues justify this enormous spending on purchasing Omniture?  I want to hear more about it.

I’m sure people who are using Creative Studio 4 see some room for improvement too,  but this is not my cup of tea and I can’t come up with additional items for my wish list that would please the graphic and Web designers.  But if my seven wishes become a reality, I’ll openly admit that Flash platform is a killer.

Yakov Fain

Today, Adobe made a very interesting announcement – Adobe Flash Platform Services for Distribution is available to the public.  To put it simple, it’s a new way of distributing, promoting, and measuring the usage of your applications on the Web.

Let’s say you’ve developed a Flash RIA (i.e. a game, a movie promo, a stock-market widget) – now you’ll be able to make it available to other people in a viral fashion over the major social networks. You’ll get an API that will let you add the “Share” button similar to the way you can share the video on Youtube. But this button will allow for cross-network distribution and the user will be presented with a choice of social networks to distribute it to.

Developers get a new API to add this Share functionality to their applications. Adobe will also offer sharing these applications between the mobile devices that support Flash platform.  This feature is available for free to anyone. To make it clear, your applications remain hosted on your servers – only an HTML snippet that provides a reference to your applications is distributed.

The publishers who want to promote their product will be able create and run a campaign for a fee targeting specific audiences on the social networks. Say, if you are looking for an application on Facebook, Myspace, iGoogle et al. that explains how to make your belly flat, publishers, who purchased promotions will be able to offer THEIR applications about getting rid of extra fat to  large audiences.  Adobe promises to be able to deliver tens of thousands of installs of your application this way. An additional benefit is that publisher will be able to simply specify social networks they want to use while ordering their promotion campaigns.

The publishers will be offered rich tools for measuring the success of their distribution campaigns. To me, this immediately explained Adobe’s move to pay a premium for Omniture, the company that is in business of Web analytics and optimization.  When I asked Adobe if this new distribution platform and the  Omniture announcement are related, they declined to confirm a direct link between the two events stating that the platform is available today, but the deal with Omniture did not go through yet.  Oh well, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to put two and two together.

This new way of distribution of Flash based application shows that Adobe is very creative in finding new revenue channels and making Flash Platform very appealing way of distributing applications on the Web and in the mobile space. I know that in the mobile space Adobe is focusing on Windows ME, Symbian S60 (Nokia), and iPhone platforms, but this is all I know. I’m really hoping to hear some major news at the upcoming Adobe MAX conference bringing the latest version of Flash Player to popular mobile devices. But you can use these new  distribution services to spread your iPhone applications too.

In my opinion, introduction of this new distribution platform is the most exciting news from Adobe released in 2009.

For more information about  distributions services read this.

Yakov Fain

A couple of months ago O’Reilly has published this sample chapter of our new book Enterprise Development with Flex. For some reason, they published is as a series of my blogs, but I’m one of three co-authors of this book:

1. http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/chapter-preview-building-an-en.html
2. http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/building-an-enterprise-framewo.html
3. http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/building-an-enterprise-framewo-1.html

Yesterday, one more chapter became available – this time Adobe has published it on devnet: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_performance.html

This book will be printed as a part of the Adobe Developer’s Library. Even though printing of the book is delayed for marketing reasons, you can order an online version of the book over here.

We are using materials from his book during our advanced Flex training. The closest ones are in London in September and in Atlanta.

Yakov Fain

I got an email from an enterprise architect considering Adobe Flex as a platform for Web application development in their organization. This email contained a well prepared  list of questions/remarks/concerns that many of enterprise Web architects may face.  That’s why I decided to publish my short answers to these questions. I didn’t change the wording of the questions/ statements.

Language:

ActionScript3 is a weakly typed language

This is true, and when I started using it I was also getting angry with Flex compiler that wouldn’t catch my obvious mistake. But as you get more comfy in this environment, you’ll appreciate more and more the flexibility of this language. Most of the developers understand something like

var myCustomer: Customer=new Customer();
myCustomer.lastName=”Mary”;

But look at the following notation:

myCustomer[“lastName”]=”Mary”;

The latter instruct the AS3 compiler, “Don’t bother checking if the Customer class even has a property lastName. I know for sure that it’ll be there during the runtime”. Does it look scary? Don’t use it!

Adding a keyword dynamic in the class definition allows you adding properties on the fly. Looks scary? Don’t use it.

To get a better feeling of pros and cons of using dynamic features of the language, read this blog on different styles of programming.

But applications written in dynamically typed languages do require more testing than those written in strongly-typed ones.

AS3 has no support for generics, method overloading, threading, enums, synchronization (handling of a resource e.g. file), annotations.

You need to use a different approach while evaluating domain specific languages vs. the common-purpose ones. Flex is a domain specific language that is not used for developing powerful scalable multi-threaded solutions on the server side. With Flex you are developing just the front end for the applications that are being used by a single user working on his/her computer.
The lack of generics is not a serious drawback (I can live without them in Java too).
Method overloading is not the feature of AS3, but it can be emulated using so called …rest parameter. This is not a showstopper.
From the developer’s perspective, Flex is single-threaded which minimizes the number of mistakes of unskilled (say Java Swing) developers who didn’t put code to refresh the screen into a proper thread, which causes unpredictable results.
Flex has so called metadata markup, which can play the role of annotations. Kinda.
Flex doesn’t support enums, but if this is important for you, consider using a solution offered by Farata Systems in this blog.

For security reasons, the reading/writing in files from Flex application is restricted. In some SharedObject’s may help, but if you need to have full file I/O support consider Adobe AIR.

Difficult to program to enterprise patterns: dominated by event model

While implementing design patterns you should account for specifics of the particular language/environment. Creators of one of the MVC frameworks shoot themselves in the foot by trying to avoid Flex specific event model by introducing more generic Notification class and by implementing Observer design pattern instead of using Flex-specific binding syntax. This approach resulted in creation of overly-engineered and convoluted framework that can be used in several languages, but doesn’t take advantage of goodies available in Flex. You can find some good examples of design patterns implementations in Chapter 2 of the book Enterprise Development with Flex currently available online.

Idiosynchratic binding restrictions and difficult two-way binding; may have been addressed with Flex v4?

The two-way binding is introduced in Flex 4. While being an excellent mean for increasing the productivity of Flex developers, don’t abuse binding. Nothing comes for free and just placing these elegant curly braces actually translates to a bunch of generated AS3 code and may lead to some performance issues in UI-intensive applications.

Poor Collection framework

Yes, AS3 collections are not as advanced as in Java, but they do a decent job if you take into consideration the small size Flash Player where they have to operate.

Generally immature API with numerous traps / pitfalls

ActionScript3 is more than a ten year old language and its current version is stable and doesn’t seem to have more bugs than other languages.

No support for XML schema validation

True. On the bright sight, Flex offers very easy syntax (E4X) for XML handling. But in general, I prefer minimizing using XML, if possible. Sending strongly-typed DTO’s from the server is a lot better way to architect applications.

Platform:

Validation implementation too simple and not extensible

Consider using validation solutions from Clear Toolkit described over here. Validation solutions are extensible in Flex.

Poor error handling due to asynchronous event firing and separation of MXML and ActionScript in components

I wouldn’t use the word poor here.  When you work in asynchronous mode in any language, techniques for error handling are different. When an asynchronous callback is invoked in Flex as a result of the server side call it comes with an argument containing the error information similar to FaultEvent.

Limited printing support

True.  Consider using extended Flex components from Clear Toolkit that offer PDF generation on the client. Read more in Chapter 11 of the book Enterprise Development with Flex.

FlashPlayer 10 does not run on Windows 98 or Windows ME

So? Would you stick to Java 1.1 just because Internet Explorer doesn’t support any further versions of Java?  Stick to Flex 9 if supporting of older versions of Windows is a must.

Flash Player upgrade/compliance to potentially address bugs etc … is an overhead and will depend on customer willingness to upgrade with any frequency. If a customer refuses to upgrade then what?

As of today, there is no other software in the world that can compare with Flash Player in terms of the speed of penetration. The upgrade is extremely easy.  The customer doesn’t want it…This is a problem in a democratic society. If this would happen in Soviet Union, KGB would simply send him/her to a labor camp in Siberia. This technique won’t work in the current enterprise environment though. Just ignore such customers. I know that some people turn off JavaScript support in their Web browsers, but this is not a good reason for not using JavaScript for Web development.

Testing:

Poor / complex unit testing of component behaviour

FlexUnit 4 adds a lot more flexibility for those who want it.

Absent integration testing between Flex client and middle tier

This is not true. The proper use of build scripts (Ant or Maven) in conjunction with such continuous integration tools as CruiseControl allows you to set up an environment that fits your needs.

Absent test automation

This is not true. Look at the open source FlexMonkey or commercial tools like QTP or Neoload

Lack of available testing tools
See above

Build:

Unimplemented build process automation

You might be tired by now by my suggestions to look at the Clear Toolkit, but it includes Fx2Ant tool that automatically generates Ant scripts for your Flash Builder projects.

Complexity:

Asynchronous platform difficult to code safely to resulting in unpredictable/inconsistent behavior

I see no grounds for such accusations. Asynchronous way of communication with the server side components is implemented in an easy to understand and consistent manner.

Complex event driven MVC model overlayed upon Flash’s own event model
Internal Flex MVC model implemented in some components is typically built using binding and is not complex.

Mixing ActionScript and MXML -> complex, unstructured code (flabby code) – not dissimilar to coding JSPs with moderate to large amounts of JavaScript per file

MXML and AS3 code can be completely separated using various techniques. If you are into design patterns, read about the Code Behind over here.

No automated XML serialization support -> complex error prone data mapping and in some cases tests are the only mechanism to capture errors

I recommend minimizing use of XML in favor of strongly-typed data transferred using AMF or RTMP protocols.

No coding standards/guidelines developed to instruct developer’s on how best to develop, what best practice is etc …

Read about coding conventions here. A number of articles/books on best practices in Flex is already available in this number is growing

Follows same paradigm as HMTL/Javascript

I don’t agree. The main difference is that MXML gets automatically converted into AS3, which in turns gets compiled into bytecode. The byte code runs in the browser-independent VM. This is a huge advantage over developing in unpredictable HTML/JavaScript environments.

Code duplication:

Duplication of model across tiers

I wouldn’t call DTO’s that are traveling between the client and the server code duplication.

Duplication of validation rules across tiers

You shouldn’t program duplicate validation rules on the client and the server. Ideally, your Flex RIA should be developed as a stateful client, and you should apply validation logic accordingly without any duplication.

Technology boundary -> business logic tends to bleed into UI

I wouldn’t use the word bleed in this context. RIA with Flex is like a different incarnation of Client/Server technology. In the desktop world, Visual Basic or PowerBuilder also included a portion of business logic. Popularity of thin Web clients was rather a result of the stateless nature of HTTP protocols then business-driven solutions.

Third party support and documentation:

Incomplete IDE support: no refactoring, poor search functionality, missing many productivity features

Agree.  Flash Builder has room for improvements. IntelliJ IDEA may be considered an alternative IDE for some hard-core developers.

Few / immature third party library support

I know more than a dozen of third-party frameworks used by Flex developers.

Few written examples / templates – or too simple – of Flex in the enterprise
Agree, developers need more enterprise-level books and articles. Flex became a serious player on the enterprise market about three years ago and this explains relatively small number of non-trivial coding examples and case studies.  Flex is very easy to get started with, but unless you have an experienced technical leader on your project the chances are that you may create a poorly designed and slow performing application.

BlazeDS has some problems in relation to session management. We would need to rework the code or wait for a release to fix these problems

Consider re-thinking what data should be stored in a session. Ideally 90% of your session data should be stored on the client.

Client / user experience:

Slower startups due to fat client

You need to learn modularization techniques of Flex applications. Unless you are developing a Hello World type application, it has to have more than one SWF.

Requires Flash runtime @ set version with OS support

The ease of Flash Player upgrade makes this a non-issue

General:

Much lower productivity compared to other frameworks; especially around XML transformation

I’d say that Flex is more productive environment than most others that I know about. I’d highly recommend avoiding using XML as a data format for client/server communications.

Much greater testing required due to asynchronous application behavior; testing is tricky as timing affects the results

True. Plan more time for testing of your enterprise Flex applications. On the other hand, you can extend and customize AMF and RTMP protocols (channels, endpoints, and adapters) and wrap them up into a separate layer to add more security, reliability or some business-specific functionality to create Web applications that are a lot more robust than HTML/JS ones.

Steep learning curve: significantly different programming paradigm to Java web development

I wouldn’t call it a steep, but it’s not as easy as Adobe is trying to present. Get the right instructor or mentor.

Code scatter and poor organization leading to poor maintainability
Any event-driven programming environment may have code scattered in several entities but this doesn’t equate to poor maintainability. Based on my real-world experience in such environments (five years in PowerBuilder, two years in Visual Basic and three years in Flex) I can say that they do not require higher maintenance than Java enterprise projects, which I’ve been developing for 10+ years.

Poorer coding experience

The syntax of ActionScript looks very similar to Java and having declarative language for the UI part (MXML) is a trend in all modern RIA tools like Silverlight or JavaFX.

Proprietary technology

I used to hear this argument a lot back in 2006 when I had to convince AJAX proponents that it’s not the best choice for enterprise application. They used to say that AJAX has lots of open source frameworks and they didn’t want to lock themselves in with a proprietary technology from one vendor (Adobe). It didn’t occur to them that with Ajax, they’d definitely lock themselves in with one of the small vendors of the selected AJAX framework.
Flex SDK, BlazeDS and AMF protocol is an open source software  backed by a large vendor. If you don’t like something – get the code and modify it to as you see fit.

BlazeDS 4 has beta release; should we be investigating this version?

Abode has a history of drastically changing the API of the beta software. I wouldn’t advise to start any serious development with beta projects (the same applies to beta versions of Flash Builder 4 and LCDS 3.0). Keep an eye on the beta software but do not invest too much time in it unless you need some feature badly and are willing to keep modifying your application code with every new maintenance release.

Should we be using RemoteObject rather than XML and finding a workaround for the problem of passing nulls between Flex and Java?

Yes, you should be using RemoteObject not just to find a workaround for some problems, but to lower the network traffic, increase communication speed and work in a strongly typed environment.

Flex 4 has beta release; will this release address any of the issues raised above?

I hope that after reading my answers above you’d agree that the word issue is too strong here. Flex 4 will introduces a new set of components, Flash Builder will get new wizards (code generators) and Flash Catalyst that may improve the designer-developer workflow. But this version doesn’t introduce and revolutionary changes that would affect your decisions to use or not to use Flex platform for RIA. I personally try not to fall in love with any technology, and if I see a better RIA tool that can be used with enterprise applications, I’ll definitely consider it. As of today, I don’t see any serious competition to Flex in this space.

Those who are interested in learning/discussing Advanced features of Flex are invited to attend one of the technical seminars ran by Farata Systems. The closest ones are in London and Atlanta.

Disclaimer. I don’t work for Adobe and won’t be rewarded by them in any shape or form for promoting Flex.  I was never shy before and will not think twice discussing real issues in the design/implementation of Flex framework, but since this tool is better than others in the RIA  domain, it deserves appropriate credits.

Yakov Fain