Farata Systems      

Great Java IDE IntelliJ IDEA is available for free in the Community Edition flavor. This is good news, but IMO, it’s a little too late.

I’ve recorded the podcast where I explain my point of view.

Yakov Fain

In the upcoming months, Farata’s principals are going to run or participate in the following public and private training events:
1.    November  5-20, 2009, Saudi Arabia, private client
Adobe Certified training “Development of the RIA with Flex”
by Victor Rasputnis

2.   November 6, 2009, Atlanta, GA, private client
Advanced Flex Seminar
by Yakov Fain

3.    November 16-17, New York City, NY
Flex Camp Wall Street, http://www.flexcampwallstreet.com
Yakov Fain will present on Flex library linking

4.    December 7-8, Moscow, Russia
Master Class: Development of software with Adobe Flex,
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/458588651
by Yakov Fain and Victor Rasputnis

During January – April of 2010 we are planning to run our popular 2-day Advanced Flex training event in Austin, TX, Denver, CO, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Stay tuned.

Yakov Fain

The online publication RIARevolution.com covers everything related to development of rich Internet applications has published an interview with me as a part of the audio podcast Speak Rich. You can download it as an mp3 file or just listen to it at the following Web page: http://bit.ly/2kwOzT

In this interview we are talking about recent Adobe MAX 2009, using Flash for developing application for iPhone, upcoming Flex 4 framework, open source Clear Toolkit framework, the new book on Enterprise development with Flex  and more.

The other episodes of Speak Rich podcast are featuring the following well known software engineers:

Chet Haase, a member of the Adobe Flex SDK team
Stuart Stern, creator of a testing framework Flex Monkey
John Resig, creator of the famous JavaScript library and toolkit — jQuery

You can subscribe to this podcast at http://riarevolution.com/category/speak-rich/

Yakov Fain

This was my second MAX and, let me tell you, I enjoyed it a lot more than last year’s one. This was an intriguing event with lots of interesting news, and promises of new releases.
Being in  Los Angeles added some coolness to MAX as everyone there has the same goal: to run into a celebrity in restaurant, store, on the street… somewhere. It’s Hollywood, you know… Sure enough, I ran into couple of celebrities and even shook hands with them: Ely Greenfield and Ted Patrick. Who’s bigger than them in Flex community? I mean among those who’re in the know.

But let’s get back to business. The breaking news goes first.

Flash Player 10.1

Flash Player 10.1 is THE news of MAX 2009.  During the keynote, Kevin Lynch (OK, Okay – he’s also a celebrity) has demonstrated serious performance improvements and modest battery consumption by this VM. Right at this moment I felt how four thousand hands, in the dark, pulled out their iPhones (the rest of attendees were carrying free Blackberries of their employers). The tension in the air reached its climax as Kevin announced that with Flash Player 10.1 smooth rendering of a 3-hour movie on smart phones became a reality.

But when he said that Adobe had an agreement regarding Flash Player 10.1 with 19 out of 20 major producers of mobile devices, four thousand iPhones were returned back into pockets, purses and other belt holders. No, not this year. Apple doesn’t want to lose control over the distribution channels of applications for iPhone, and by not letting Flash Payer in the iPhone browser they are not letting me, you or him distribute our applications to the users via Flash Player.

If before MAX 2009 I was positive that Flash Player wouldn’t make it this time, now I can bet three to one that by MAX 2010 Apple will surrender. From Flash Player’s perspective, the mobile landscape will be substantially different a year from now. Competition to iPhone will keep increasing, and if today a modern Flash Player is technically non-existent in the mobile space, a year from now vast majority of these devices will run its latest version.

Apple won’t want to be the only device that shows lots of Web sites in a crippled form. Besides, enterprises and private developers won’t stop developing Flash-based RIA just because iPhone doesn’t support them.

On the positive note, Adobe announces that the upcoming Flash Pro CS5 will allow developing  applications for iPhone in ActionScript. Selecting iPhone in a deployment ComboBox will extract the ABC code from a regular SWF, and run it through the  LLVM optimizer/compiler linking all required libraries to run natively on iPhone’s ARM processor. Developers can test their new creation on the iPhone hooked up via the USB port.  After the testing is complete, the application will go through Apple reviewers, and if approved, it’ll be signed and added to Apple Store.

By doing this Adobe kills (at least) two birds with one stone. First, it’ll allow legions of ActionScript developers start working with iPhone without the need to learn not too friendly Objective-C. Second, many new developers will purchase Flash Pro CS5 just for this reason alone.

Flex 4

Flex 4 is a serious re-write.  If release of Flex 3 was a set of additions to Flex 2, this time we are facing a major change of this framework.  Developers will get a brand new set of Spark UI components. Flex engineers separated skins from the functionality of these components – they are lighter, and skinning can be done by graphic designers while developers worry about the functionality. To put it simple a Button doesn’t know how it looks. And the look can be changed without the need to modify the code of the button itself – just assign it a new skin component, and off you go.

Flex team is working on maintaining complete compatibility between the new (Spark) and old (Halo) components and we should be able to mix and match them, but for new projects it would be very hard to justify using the old set from the mx namespace.
Enterprise developers will enjoy working with new item renderers in the List based components. They support variable size items including dynamic grow/shrink, and the renderers are created only for items that are displayed.   Now lists support data-specific rendering  – you can use a callback function in place of an itemRenderer. The row data is passed to a function, which returns an appropriate renderer. We’ve been using these techniques for years (in Clear Toolkit components) by implementing a customized class factory, and it’s great that Flex 4 lists will get similar functionality. Spark renderers also support states and transitions.

Newly introduced Group and Data Group have scrolling APIwithout having scrollbars – just wrap them into a Scroller component (btw, pixel based scrolling is there too).
I really like new layout managers: custom layouts (wheel, spine, cover flow), list items don’t have to be rectangular any longer, you can use relative layouts, program post-layout transformations…
If you are Flex developer, allocate some time in your schedule for learning Flex 4 goodies.

LCDS 3.0

Lots of improvements are in the works on the server side too. LCDS will support reliable messaging and throttling (limiting the number of messages per destination or client).  Adaptive throttling sounds interesting too – the client application can control the data feed. It can command the server “slow down, I can’t keep up” or “give me more, I’m idling”.
A couple of years ago our company was working on a trading application for a financial company, and we had to manually implement throttling on the RTMP protocol level to ensure that the server won’t push the price quotes to the client in the congested network situations. The new LCDS should support this feature  by introducing conflate parameter. Adobe will offer this feature only for Data Management Services though.

The LCDS Edge server will allow partitioning of the applications across multiple network tiers with optimized server-push performance.

I’d like to take for a spin a Java-based load-testing tool for LCDS, which should let you create thousands of clients hitting your server. This is not exactly the real-world situation where the Web browsers introduce additional constraints, but at least it can give you an idea if your online gaming application can work with a thousand of concurrent users or will put the server to its knees a lot sooner.

Model-driven design and new wizards in Flash Builder are not to be missed too.  I’ve allocated a week in November for learning just this workflow alone.
Adobe, lower the price for LCDS, I mean get real. Five grand per CPU for the enterprise license sounds fair.

AIR 2.0

Unless you are creating a self-contained AIR 1.5 application, the need of integration with other non-AIR software leads to creation of convoluted architectures that require introduction of Java or C++ parts and the need of integration with them. It seems that AIR 2.0 will allow building applications that can directly launch and communicate with native applications (google for the NativeProcess class), automatically open files open by default applications, and access some of the popular devices in the USB ports.

Add to it lower memory consumption and support of the UDP-based peer-to-peer communication (DatagramSocket class), PC network detection (NetworkInfo) and you are getting really appealing platform for developing desktop applications.

Flash Catalyst

This tool remains a bit fuzzy for me. I’m still trying to find the use for it in a real world scenarios when designers and developers have to work in parallel on the same project.  Unless they will be able to seamlessly send generated and refactored code in both (designer-developer)directions, it’ll remain a prototyping tool. But let’s wait for a general release of this tool next February before jumping into conclusions.

My Wishes for MAX 2010

Overall, other than traditionally dead wi-fi, the conference was organized really well. My only wish for MAX 2010 (October 24-27, 2010 in LA) is to get read of the junk food presented as box lunches. I still remember the gourmet food of the first day of MAX 2008. Based on the fact that our company can hardly keep up with growing demand for Flex developers, I can confirm that economy is recovering really fast, and I hope that things will go well for Adobe too and they will pass some of the surplus  to us in a form of rack of lambs, Chilean sea bass,  and creme brulee for all attendees of MAX 2010.

This was a brief summary of technical news that caught my attention while attending Adobe MAX 2009.

Yakov Fain

Once in a while, Flex developers who trust us ask for some formal writeup that would help them convince their managers that hiring Farata Systems to help with their enterprise RIA project is the right thing to do. Hence, this post contains the data from our marketing brochure. Since the readers of this text are not expected to be familiar with nitty-gritty details of development with Adobe Flex, we tried not to use many technical terms here. But if you need to convince a technical person that we know Flex Framework inside out,let us know and we’ll start using jargon.

The main goal of this short write-up is to answer the question that our perspective clients must ask themselves, “What are the advantages of hiring Farata Systems to help with our project versus many other vendors working in the same field?”

During the last 3+ years Farata Systems primarily works on development of enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIA) utilizing Adobe Flex and AIR technologies on the client and J2EE in the server side. Besides working as consultants, we also develop reusable components and tools to improve productivity of  Flex/Java developers.  For example, we created a CRUD generator, a logger, an ANT script generator, Java/Flex DTO generator, and a library of enhanced Flex components. We’ve open sourced these components and tools under the name Clear Toolkit, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit – all this software is available at no charge under MIT license.

O’Reilly is about to release a book “Enterprise Development with Flex” written by three founders and business partners of Farata Systems. This is their second advanced book devoted to enterprise application development with Flex and Java. The book covers the best practices and shows concrete examples of creation of enterprise-grade components and enhancing communication protocols offered by Adobe. Besides being an advanced and well researched manuscript, this book stands out among other Flex books available on the market because it’s printed as a part of Adobe Developer Library, which required approval of the authors by the members of the Adobe Flex Team.

Farata’s Flex and Java experts are invited to speak at several major conferences each year worldwide, including Adobe Max conference.

Below is a short summary of what Farata Systems brings to the table of any enterprise that develops RIA with Flex.

1.    Farata Systems doesn’t hire junior developers. Based on our experience, some enterprise managers make a serious mistake by hiring the least expensive offshore developers who either went through a short Flex training or just spent several months of the real-world development with Flex.  Even though Flex is a relatively simple tool to start working with, lack of understanding of its internals leads to creation of slow to load, poorly performed and not scalable applications. Pretty often, Farata’s engineers are being hired for helping to fix the issues in the projects that were developed by other vendors, but it’s not always easy to fix enterprise applications that were initially architected in a wrong way.

2.    When hired for a project, Farata’s engineers start with trying to deeply understand the internals of the customer’s application, which allows them to suggest optimization of each tier of RIA. In some cases, they suggest smarter messaging on the server to lower the number of created threads. Sometimes, it makes sense to split the business traffic over different communication channels to improve the round-trip time. Special attention is being paid to splitting large enterprise into a set of loadable on demand libraries and modules, and this is done on the early stages of the project.

3.    Adobe offers two products supporting efficient communications between client and server tiers. One of them is a robust and scalable product is called LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS), but its licensing costs thousands US dollars per each CPU utilized on the server. There is an open source and free solution Adobe BlazeDS, but it’s not scalable off the shelf. Farata’s engineers invested substantial amount of time experimenting in the area of improving robustness and scalability  of BlazeDS, and were able to create a solution for BlazeDS installed under Jetty Server that can support at least 5000 concurrent users. The results of this research and a video recording of the stress test of this solution has been published in this blog. For some enterprise applications the ability to switch from LCDS to BlazeDS means savings of $100,000 or more.

4.    The speed of the client/server data roundtrip is crucial for success of many RIA, especially for those that process high-volumes of data in the real time. The roundtrip time depends on many factors (the distance between the client and server, the number of hops for each packet, the speed of up and down streams et al.) Farata Systems architects know how to customize the implementations of the communication protocols base on the specifics of each customer’s environment. For example, recently we’ve implemented customized communication protocols for a financial trading application adding such features as
- throttling (to handle the cases when the server pushes too many messages, but the network is congested)
- adding application-specific information to the headers of the underlying messages between Flex and LCDS
- improved reliability of the protocol by adding recoverability in case of lost connection
- processing of the out-of-sequence messages.

5.    People often judge the application’s performance by the speed of appearance of the main view of the RIA. Knowledge of Flex internals allows us to design and fine-tune the startup process of the Flex-based RIA to make them appear on the user’s monitor as quickly as possible.

6.    Some enterprise RIA require generation of various reports.  Development of reportsin Flex  requires allocating substantial time and human resources. Farata  Systems created a reporting tool (ClearBI) for Flex applications that leads to tremendous productivity boost in this area.

7.    Each of Farata’s consultants knows how to use components from the mentioned above Clear Toolkit framework, which is yet another reason of making then more productive than an average Flex developer.

8.    Farata’s experts contribute to Flex community maintaining a highly-regarded technical blog where we publish commentaries and share best practices, tips and tricks useful for many Flex developers. The blog is located at http://flexblog.faratasystems.com.

Testimonials

The development team at Farata Systems is capable of delivering any size Flex development project. Their lead engineering and management personnel are some of the best engineers in the business.  They show real leadership in combining the best of Java and Adobe Flex. I highly recommend Farata Systems

Ted Patrick, Platform Evangelist, Adobe Systems

Farata Systems continues to impress me with consistent leadership and knowledge. Their understanding of the RIA space is unmatched. After working with some of the largest Flex developers in US I am convinced we found the best. Farata’s team took our application from a crippled on-demand platform to something we use daily with clients across United States
Aaron G. Blackledge, CTO, Future Systems Advisors, LLC

I wish every vendor would be as easy to work with as Farata Systems. Complex components made for us by Farata have saved us time and money. They proactively helped to fine tune design specifications, and beat the             deadlines. Their turnaround for the code modifications was lightning fast. We are planning to work with them again
Mica Endsley, President, SA Technologies

Without Farata’s Clear Data Builder we wouldn’t have chosen Adobe Flex
Niel Reuben, the founder of a Silicon Valley startup
Listen to what Mr. Reuben had to say at http://myflex.org/demos/Niel_on_CDB.mp3

This podcast is about the closing  day of Adobe MAX 2009: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/
How I understand the iPhone/Flash situation
Good read about AIR 2.0
The Adobe MAX 2009 videos for developers are published the next day!

Yakov Fain

I’m continuing covering Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles. This podcast is about the day 2 at the conference: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/

Yakov Fain

I want to congratulate Adobe on the very impressive show they put tonight called “Adobe Sneaks”. The message they conveyed was that these outstanding pieces of technology were actually “play code” written by Adobe engineers either in spare time or as proof of concept. And the audience was very clear on both power of Adobe Platform and ability of Adobe engineering to deliver extraordinary results.

Couple of smaller sneaks really puzzled me. I am sucker for development productivity and the teaser that allowed you to do code editing while still in debugger session seemed like the greatest productivity boost while providing better developer experience then (my previous benchmark) VisualBasic 6 in-place debugging. For large projects it SAVES HOURS EVERY DAY and allow developer to stay focused on the code writing and debugging instead of going through lengthly mindless process. This is the top feature I want in the next Flash Builder. It took me 3 beers during bash to figure it out – was not trivial (I hope – can’t be sure till tomorrow morning;)) :

The replacement unit is the modified function and not the statement itself or class. Adobe would have to modify compiler/debugger to do MIR or LLVM of the AS3 code and in-place JIT, but once it is done you can do the magic. In case of the modified function being on execution stack, revert the function context to the last entrance point in the modified function and fast forward to the breakpoint – you have in-place editing while debugging. MIR/JIT integration is coming to the FlashBuilder as a part of Mobile Kit integration, and can be incorporated as a layer of compiler callbacks in debugger context. Depending on the integration of native compiler into tool chain it can be feasible enough to do it to the code in constructors or code that gets into _init sections but even pure function replacements will get 99% of the expected functionality.

The best side effect is that in debugging you really need to re-run the last executed statements and scoping to function does just that. Great job, Adobe.

There is no doubt in my mind that Adobe is very close of turning this platform into software revolution over the next few years. I am certain enough that I bought Adobe stock today regardless of the current economic situation as long term impact of their platform is so great.

Sincerely,
Anatole Tartakovsky

Flex 4 is a huge upgrade – after all it is a complete rewrite of virtually every bit of Flex code. It requires formal retraining or at least completely open mind and few weeks of going through samples that come with Flex 4 and understanding the differences and capabilities of the NEW platform.

This morning I went to the session Model-Driven Development with Flash Builder and LiveCycle Data Services. It was presented using newly minted Flex 4 beta and unlike the beta 1 that I had to fight through to make the sample to build, the wizards and code generators in beta 2 generally worked. There were some “gotchas” in the process but they were either simple to figure out or even had understandable error message so it is quite passable for the Beta product.

But the thing that was crucial for me to watch people in the room. Aside from typical problems of the front-end developers with Eclipse, a surprising number of people sailed through examples with reasonable understanding of the process. The crucial piece in making the non-trivial process of developing a multi-tier application manageable was correct placing of integration in the middle, and visual integration of the functionality directly into Flash Builder painters and property sheets.

There are other non-engineering components like pricing, but this release finally has potential of making LCDS easy enough for developers – assuming it works. It also gets Flash into top rank of RAD tools – for those who will adopt this development model.

As soon as I complete my current Flex projects in release stage, I am switching every new one to Flex 4/LCDS modeling. Flex community can expect the following new goodies from in a Clear Toolkit framework:

• Farata Systems will provide a native (SQL) adapter for data management compatible with Flex 4 later this year.
• Clear Data Builder will have a plugin to synchronize the data model and SQL adapters
• The missing features like client driven transactions will be added to Flex 4 code generators
• Forms and controls artifacts that are not to my liking as this is definitely the first version of this technology will be merged with the Clear Data Builder stack

Sincerely
Anatole Tartakovsky

Published a new episode of my No BS IT podcast covering Adobe MAX, Monday, Oct 5 2009: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/.
Features of Flash Player 10.1: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.html

Stay tuned.

Yakov Fain

Adobe announced Flash code generator for iPhone and I am very confused. I do not care if it makes trivial port of Flash games – iPhone does not really lack games. While people call it half step in the right direction, it does nothing for me or any Flex developer. Kevin Lynch communicated the amount of frustration Adobe had with this integration, but I believe that keeping pressure on Apple and continue working on competitive platforms would be more productive.

However, it is announced and will be out in few month (still to be defined) and we need to start working with it ASAP – as people do need mobile computers. I went through few sessions that talk about challenges in development for mobile platform and I do understand that challenges of Mobile platform are too great to hope for simple port. So we will need to add this tool and start thinking/practicing using this model so we can help developers when the product is released.

Underlying technology is not disclosed , just shown add-hoc “Save As” target in Flash Pro CS5 to generate ARM/iPhone code. From the presentation, it looks like they built very limited player as bootstrap code for iPhone, connected ARM codegenerator to MIR/LLVM processor, applied that to generated SWF, linked to bootstrap and produce now native iPhone application. Till I load these applications in my iPhone and find time to look at it more carefully I would assume it is the process.

But here is the second problem – and that is more of personal issue. Are we ready to let Apple force us to compile HTML page and submit it to Apple store every time we decide to write something?

Today 9 out of 10 attendes of Adobe MAX carries iPhone – including me. The percentage of early adopters and trend setters is very high here. IMHO, right now Adobe holds the key to success to Palm/Blackberry/Google platforms.

Sincerely
Anatole Tartakovsky

Published the next podcast covering my participation in the conference Adobe Max 2009: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/

Started while driving to the airport and finished in LA. How I spend my first day in LA, and the first major software announcement at Adobe MAX 2009: http://flex.sys-con.com/node/1130905

Till tomorrow…

This is the first in a mini series covering my participation in a great event called Adobe MAX 2009 that will take place in Los Angeles, CA on October 4-7, 2009: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/ .

Stay tuned.

Yakov Fain

If you don’t want to wait until the next stable build of Clear Toolkit plugins will be published on sourceforge, you can get all the current sources from CVS and create the fresh build. Go to Sourceforge https://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/ and download the file SettingEnvironmentForClearToolKitDevelopers.pdf deom the General Docs section.

This information is also useful if you’d like to become a contributor to this open source project.