If you work for a large corporation, the chances are high that you are entitled for taking one or two training classes each year. In some cases you even get to choose which classes to attend. I mean off-sight training. But most likely, you are enrolling a class offered onsite by an invited instructor.

IT training classes can be divided into two main categories: five full consecutive days or two-three months long evening classes. The latter are for people who want to get fundamental training and have time to study and absorb the material.
If you are planning to learn new software by attending a five-day instructor-led class, the most efficient way is… to learn it by yourself before the class.  I’m not kidding. This way you’ll know what questions to ask the instructor during his/her short visit.
I’ll give you an example from my own career.  Back in 1998, I was a client-server developer (PowerBuilder and Visual Basic) who wanted to switch to Java. Being an independent contractor, I had to switch gears fast to make sure that my billable rate won’t suffer. How can one quickly convert from PowerBuilder expert to a senior enterprise Java developer?  J2EE was completely different comparing to any client-server technology.

Learning the syntax of yet another language is the easiest part, unless it’s an Objective-C.  But understanding the architecture and the best practices of new environment is always a challenge. To make the story short, I went through a couple of Java books by myself, and then enrolled to a five-day class “Developing J2EE applications with BEA Web Logic”. I got lucky – the instructor was good (he had the real-world experience). Five days and $2500 later, I was ready to work on real world Java projects. I still believe that attending an instructor-led class after self-studying is the best way to learn.

Computer-based training is usually boring.  You can’t ask questions, but have to take computer-based tests. Multiple-choice SAT-like exams are equally stupid everywhere. They just prove that you are good at taking multiple choice exams.

Instructor-led training remains your best choice.  In the class, use your own laptop to make this training efficient. Contact the instructor prior to class and ask what software has to be installed. These days, unless you are getting into SAP or CICS-like software, you can download and install evaluation copy to your laptop. It’s better than using a desktop provided in the classroom, because you take with you the software with training files after the class is over. It’s properly configured with the help of the instructor and all samples work. Add to this well written courseware (is it well written?) and you are armed and dangerous.

If you are not sure where to find a reputable instructor for the software you want to learn, find the conferences related to this software. Pretty often, one day intensive training is offered the day before or after the conference. Instructors that are approved to teach a class at a major conference are usually good. I’m not saying that you have enroll into this short class, but google the name of the instructor – the chances are that s/he teaches longer classes as well.

Check the training catalogs of your local universities, where evening classes in schools of continuing education are often taught by practitioners.

While in class, try to get as much help from your instructor as possible. Most of the instructors enjoy helping students. Don’t be shy. There’s no such thing as stupid questions in the classroom.

At the end of the class, never forget to fill out evaluation sheets. Instructors have to present them to their managers. Be nice to them. Even if you didn’t like something in this training, leave your comments and submit your evaluation sheet.

In September-October of 2010, I’ll be wearing a student’s hat twice and be an presenter in one event. I’ve already registered into two conferences: Java One by Oracle and Adobe MAX, and I know exactly what I’m looking for besides networking. At JavaOne I’ll attend every technical session on the upcoming JDK 7 release, and at MAX, my main educational goal is getting good at development for Android platform. But first, I’ll be one of the presenters at the Third Annual Flex Symposium here in New York City.  I like being in classrooms.

Yakov Fain

After the approval process was done, O’Reilly sent us the Flex team members feedback without revealing the names of engineers who wrote them. Most of them were 100% positive. But our special thanks go to one unknown member of Flex team who wrote something like, “I don’t agree with many of the things that these authors write about Flex in their blogs and articles, and I’d rather not approve them, but I will because there are not many people in the industry who are capable of writing such a book.” We don’t know your name, but we consider this assessment to be the best compliment we’ve received so far.

Looking forward to meeting with the members of Adobe Flex team in October at MAX conference.  The authors of this book are going to attend this event in LA in October.

Our praise goes to the O’Reilly cover designers who correctly visualized three authors of this book without ever meeting them in person.

If you bought this book, Farata’s team would really appreciate if you’d spend 10 minutes and publish your review of this book on Amazon. It doesn’t have to be long, but we are looking for getting your honest opinion about our work.

Your truly,
Yakov Fain

I really value people who speak up freely and have something to say. Valery is disappointed with Flex 4, but I’d like to take it one step further. I’m disappointed with Adobe.
To put it simple, Adobe is sloooooow. I mean really slow, and I’m not sure what’s the reason.  I know some people from Flex team. They are smart. They can deliver given the right support from top management and proper investment, which is definitely not there.

Let me build the case. Slowly.
Four years ago, when Adobe purchased Macromedia, I was looking for a decent tool for development of the enterprise Web applications.  At that time I was disappointed with Java Swing. Wrong decisions at the top level of Sun Microsystems resulted in having 75% of the computers running Internet Explorer with… ten years old Java run-time. Sun Microsystems won the lousy $10B law suit with Microsoft back in 1998, but lost the battle. Their runtime (yes, the JVM) is not installed at the consumers’ computers.

Four years ago, Adobe’s Flash Player (it’s a VM too) gave me some hope. The runtime was there, the library of rich components  was there too, installing Flash Player was piece of cake. I started working with Flex.

This new for me Flex/Flash community was a bit unusual after Java. It was small.  I had a feeling as if we are in a small country club chanting, “We are the best”.  Flex developers knew each other by names. Adobe Flex technical evangelists were Gods. This was different from Java community of six million of professional developers.

But Adobe didn’t have competition in the area of enterprise rich Internet applications in 2006, 2007, 2008… Until the greatest “Me too” firm from Redmond, WA realized that RIA is the right place to be and IE is not the only browser people have. They started working on this Silverlight thingy. Two years ago they released the 1.0 version that could be ignored – nothing but video streaming was there. At the same time Adobe released Flex 3, which had pretty much everything: 98% penetration of runtime, rich library of components, fast communication protocols, and the server-side component LCDS, that nobody but filthy rich Wall Street firms could afford.

Two years later, Microsoft released three more versions of Silverlight, and the only thing that stopped them from presenting a serious threat to Flex was low penetration of their runtime. Microsoft has tons of cash and excellent engineers. During the same period of time, Adobe has released Flex 4 in hard labor. It took Adobe two years to release the next incomplete version of Flex. Why?

Being a Java developer, I was watching closely the evolution of JavaFX, yet another wannabe player in RIA.  I clearly a similar pattern there. Top-level management proclaims at every keynote that “We are the best” without giving enough juice for engineering teams that work hard developing a product.
The bad guy, Steve Jobs, doesn’t even know what Flex is. He’s not happy with Flash Player. Need to admit, he’s not playing by the rules trying to say that Flash Player is junk and a main reason that crashes the OS. He’s bad, but he’s not stupid. Adobe couldn’t offer a better response than “We love Apple”.

Yes, Flash Player is installed on 98% of desktops, as if we don’t know that not many consumers are using desktops today, and in five years they will become minority.
Steve Jobs, the bad guy, made Adobe moving just a little bit faster and they finally released Flash Player 10.1 in 18 months (!) after the 10.0 release.

Two years for the next and incomplete version of Flex. Eighteen months for 0.1 upgrade of Flash Player. Dumb pricing policy on LCDS that makes it unaffordable for even a small group of loyal customers. Not a Wall Street giant? Get out of here. Is this the way to treat customers?
Let’s get back to the tooling. This smart idea to bring together designers and developer gave birth to yet another prototyping tool called Flash Catalyst. Is it more than just a prototyping tool? Tell me why?

Here comes the Flash Builder (formerly Flex Builder). Flash developers (they haven’t seen any better) were so happy with Flex Builder 3… From the Java developer’s perspective, this was a mediocre and damn slow Eclipse plugin. Flash Builder 4 after two years of development was not a major improvement either. I’m not sure why JetBrains doesn’t want to invest a couple of rubles and add a WYSIWYG designer for Flex. As soon as they do it – Flash Builder is brain dead.

The next target is Flex 4 SDK.   The new Spark library of components with separating the functionality of components and their skinning implemented just half of the components comparing with Flex SDK 3. In two years they could have done better if they were a large company catering for developers.  But they are not. Until Photoshop and PDF remain their main source of revenue, the tooling for software developers will be pushed aside.

Adobe was and remains a small company. They do what they can.  And it doesn’t seem that they can do much more for us, developers.

Yakov Fain
P.S. This is my personal opinion. My employer may think differently.

Yakov Fain

All Java classes form an inheritance tree with the class Object on top of the hierarchy – all Java classes are direct or indirect descendants of Object. When you declare a non-primitive variable, you are allowed to use either the exact data type of this variable or one of its ancestor data types. For example, if the class NJTax extends Tax each of the following lines is correct.

NJTax myTax1 = new NJTax();
Tax myTax2 = new NJTax(); // upcasting
Object myTax3 = new NJTax(); // upcasting

Java is smart enough to automatically cast an instance of the class to its ancestor. When the variable has more generic class than an instance of the object it’s called upcasting. Let’s say the class object has ten methods and class variables defined, the class Tax (it’s an implicit subclass of Object) adds five more methods and variables (total 15), and NJTax adds another two (total 17). The variable myTax1 will have access to all 17 methods and variables, myTax2 will see only 15, and myTax3 just 10. Why not always use exact types in variable declarations?

Let’s say you need to write a program that will process the data about workers of a certain company. Some of them are full time employees, and some are contractors, but you’d like to read them from some data source and into the same array. Arrays can store only the objects of the same type, remember?

Since Java can automatically upcast the objects, you can create a class Person with two subclasses: Employee and Contractor, and then read the records from a database, and based on the employment type, create an appropriate object instance and put it into an array of type Person:

Person workers[] = new Person [100];
workers[0] = new Employee(“Yakov”, “Fain”);
workers[1] = new Employee(“Mary”, “Lou”);
workers[2] = new Contractor(“Bill”, “Shaw”);
…

Of course, you could’ve created two separate arrays for employees and contractors, but I’m laying the foundation here for explaining polymorphism – a powerful concept of object-oriented languages.

At some point you’ll need to process the data from the array workers. Say, in a loop you can test the data type of the current element of the array with the operator instanceOf, then downcast the object (it can’t be done automatically) to Employee or Contractor, and process it accordingly.

for (int i; i<20; i++){
Employee currentEmployee;
Contractor currentContractor;

if (worksers[i] instanceof Employee){
currentEmployee = (Employee) workers[i];
// do some employee processing here
} else if (worksers[i] instanceof Contractor){
currentContractor = (Contractor) workers[i];
// do some contractor processing here
}
}

Placing a data type in parenthesis in front of another object means that you want to downcast this object to specified type. You can downcast an object only to one of its descendant data types. Even though the above code has correct syntax, it doesn’t represent the best practice of processing similar objects. In the next lesson you’ll see how to use polymorphism to do it in a more generic way.
If a class implements an interface, you can cast it to this interface. Say, a class Employee implements Payable, Insurable, Pensionable interfaces:

class Employee implements Payable, Insurable, and Pensionable {
// implementation of all interfaces goes here
}

If in particular code you are interested in its Insurable behavior, there’s not need to cast the Object to type Employee, just cast it to Insurable type as shown in the code fragment below. Keep in mind though that if you do so, the variable current employee will expose the access to only those methods that were declared in the Insurable interface.

Insurable currentEmployee;

if (worksers[i] instanceof Employee Insurable){
currentEmployee = (Insurable) workers[i];
// do some insurance-specific processing here
}

Is it clear enough? I’d appreciate your feedback.

Yakov Fain

While today, it may seem obvious to you that a particular method will never ever need to be overridden, you might not properly predict all use-patterns of this class. If this happens, some other developer will have to jump through the hoops to create another version of such a method in a subclass. If you don’t want to be cursed in the future, think twice if you really really want to declare this method as final. Do you see any benefits in using final methods?
We had to extend a third party library to improve their implementation of a certain networking protocol. As it usually happens, the code was poorly documented, so we had to read the code to find out which method to override in the subclass. Sure enough, that method was declared as final.

We found a workaround and still replaced the call to the final method to the call to our own. So what the original developer achieved by using final? He made our work more difficult than it should have been.

Originally, Java compiler was optimizing (inlining) final methods. Today I’ve learned (thank you, Heinz) that Java compiler doesn’t do it anymore, and they are optimized by the Hotspot JVM:

http://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive/Issue157.html

http://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive/Issue158.html

Who are these guys we’re protecting from by using final? BTW, I also believe that the keyword protected is equally useless.

Yakov Fain

Well, it’s not exactly a complete solution, because after a week of training, a senior Java developer becomes a Flex rookie, but at least these people are familiar with business.

Finding a qualified Flex/Java consultant is literally impossible. Enterprise HR managers pretend not knowing that an hourly rate is the only perk consultants  have. Corporations don’t offer competitive rates. Our consultancy has a couple of job requests for Flex/Java consultants from a long term customer from Wall Street, and we’re interviewing people with a little hope to find the right consultants for the money offered for these positions.

Train your own people regardless of what background they have. Recently, I had a student with no practical programming background. I figured it out after he asked me to “explain the benefits of casting”. But this guy was really motivated, and I’m sure he’ll make it.

Our company already has a request to teach Flex to a group of Cobol programmers in September. This should be fun.  The first day should be spent on teaching the concepts of object-oriented programming. So what? Anyone who wants to learn will.

Will the demand for Flex developers sustain? This week I’ve presented at Atlanta Flex User Group.  Here’s one of the questions I got after the talk, “Does your company experience lower demand of Flex consultants in the enterprise world because Flash is not supported on iPhone?”  Absolutely not.  Rich Internet Applications are being developed at full swing regardless of the fences built by Steve Jobs. iPhone is not a threat for the Enterprise RIA.  The only thing that bothers me is the slowness of Adobe in offering new releases of Flex and related tools and technologies.

While everyone is busy talking about the latest news from the iPhone battlefield or how Android is doing, I’m closely watching Microsoft.  As expected, they are becoming the real competition to Adobe in the field of the enterprise RIA. While Adobe is talking about new Designer-Developer workflow, Microsoft implements it. The penetration of Silverlight runtime is over 50%. Give them another year to build up the muscles…

Anyway, are you looking for senior enterprise Flex developers? Me too.

Yakov Fain

11. In August-September I’ll be running a week of online live Intro to Java class – stay tuned.

That’s all folks. See you in one of the meeting rooms.

Yakov Fain

For those who are not following Cairngorm evolution, I want to remind that there was a framework called Cairngorm 2, that was a library of classes (built on Model-View-Controller architecture) to be included in the Flex application. I never agreed with the architecture of Cairngorm 2 which was acting as a Crazy Glue and lead to generation of monolithic applications based on global singletons. People who follow my writings or were attending my presentations at various conferences know that during the last four years I was openly stating that Cairngorm 2 has more cons than pros. For example, here’s the just one of of these occasions – a video of the panel on enterprise frameworks at Adobe MAX 2008 (after this blog, I doubt that I’ll ever be approved as a MAX speaker again).

Now, when I looked at the design of a product that’s now branded as Cairngorm 3, it’s clear that Adobe assigned to this project the right engineers (i.e. Alex Uhlmann) and there is hope that this methodology (it’s not an MVC framework any longer) may produce or include useful component libraries.

My first problem is that the Cairngorm 2 has literally disappeared from the face of Earth (the only trace found is the site cairngormdocs.org that has some old documentation).

My second, and more serious problem is that Adobe Consulting up till today has never made a statement that selecting Cairngorm 2 was a wrong path. There are lots of enterprises that some time ago started using Cairngorm 2 (recommendation by Adobe Consulting) just to find themselves with a large monolithic application at hand that took long to download and was difficult to modularize.

A couple of years ago, I lead a large enterprise project for a customer that I won’t name, but will provide some relevant technical details. When I joined, the team was already 5 months into the project. This consumer facing application was producing one 5Mb SWF file. Just recompiling the application in Flex Builder was a lengthy project. I started to look at ways of modularizing this application so the first screen would come up sooner than 90 seconds for customers sitting on DSL connections.

Sure enough, the project has been built with Cairngorm 2 by advise of some engineer from Adobe Consulting (not to be confused with Adobe Flex team). The Cairngorm’s global class FrontController is expected to be a registry for all possible events that travel through the system let alone tons of classes and boilerplate code written just to support that life cycle of the framework itself.

My first suggestion was to start modularization with removing Cairngorm. They asked, “How much?” It would take two man-weeks worth of work, but they didn’t have time for this. To make the long story short, we had to modularize the application in a non-kosher way – the main SWF had a knowledge about all events in every module. Changes in a module’s code can lead to changes in the main applications. Tight coupling in action.

I’m sure there are lots of enterprise teams that were similarly misguided and were marching in a wrong direction under the Cairngorm 2 banner.

With the release of Cairngorm 3, the Cairngorm 2 has vanished. I’m sure, if you’ll hire a private eye, you’ll find its code (has not been updated from about three years) in some SVN repository. But this is not how the new version of the enterprise software should be released.
I’d like Adobe Consulting to state loud and clear, “If your team started development of a large enterprise project with Cairngorm 2, please stop. This was our mistake, and the sooner you switch to Cairngorm 3 or any other lighter framework the better.”

Will it happen? Let’s wait and see.

Yakov Fain
P.S. The views and opinions expressed in this blog are purely my own and don’t represent views of my employer

The last portion of the presentation was about how to deal with unreliable messaging of BlazeDS. Interestingly enough, some people from the audience were complaining that even in LiveCycle Data Services 3, the reliable messaging part is not documented and it’s hard to get support from Adobe. If you don’t know what unreliable AMF messaging is, read this post. We already had a number of projects started form a phone call, “One of our clients doesn’t receive responses to RemoteObject requests…once in a while. Others seems to be fine. Can you help?” Yes we can.

You can download the presentation slides here.
There were no video recording crew at the conference, but due to multiple requests, I’ll record this presentation and publish it as a screencast in early June.

My special thanks to Adobe for raising LCDS prices – this means more business for us as more and more corporate clients are looking for reasonably priced solution and architect their projects using BlazeDS.
Farata Systems will gladly help our clients in building robust, scalable, and reliable Flex-BlazeDS-Java applications.

If you are new to Flex, consider taking this 5-day live online training course.

Yakov Fain

Here’s my current calendar:

April 26-30: Teaching a week of Flex intro at Home Depot, Atlanta, GA
May 10-14, Teaching Adobe Certified Flex 4 (!) class at AT&T, New Jersey
May 15, Speaking at Flash and the City in New York on LCDS alternatives.
May 17, Teaching a one-day workshop on modularization of Flex applications (btw, if you enter discount code saynotowifi you’ll get $100 off the price)
May 20-21, Teaching a 2-day Advanced Flex seminar at AT&T in New Jersey
May 24-28, Teaching an intro Flex class at Home Depot in Atlanta, GA
June 7-8, Teaching a 2-day Advanced Flex seminar for a private client in
Casablanca, Morocco.
June 21-25, Teaching an Intro Flex class to a private client.

My colleague Victor is finishing consulting project and will be running two two-weeks training engagements for a private Middle-East client. This will be a a mix of formal classes and one-on-one mentoring sessions.

On our waiting list, we have two requests for a one-day Modularization workshop from and two-day Flex overview from private clients. They want me it in May…

Also, we’re planning to start running online live Flex and Java training classes, but that’s in July.

And let me tell you, I love being overloaded with training requests!

Yakov Fain

We suggest a solution to your Flex problem within two business days. You pay us after that whatever you feel is fair.

Here’s how it works:

1. You contact us explaining the issue your enterprise Flex RIA is facing.

2. We analyze your issue and within two business days suggest a solution to your problem.  Most likely we’ll either need to review your code or will ask for a test application that reproduces the issue you’re having.

3. We’ll send you a link to pay for the service with an empty field “Amount”. You enter the amount and pay whatever you feel is fair. No matter what amount you are going to enter (including $0), we’ll take it, no questions asked.

This offer is valid only to enterprise teams working on Flex/Java projects. This is not an offer for fix bugs of every software developer working with Flex .

Why have we decided to announce this new service? Well, technically it’s not new. Pretty often we are presented with a problem by a perspective client, then we spend some time finding the proper remedy, present it to the requester, which pretty often turns into a new contract. It just seemed the right thing to explicitly offer this service when many project managers may not even know that there is an affordable solution to their problem.

Too good to be true? Try it. Fill out the Contact Us form at faratasystems.com. New clients only.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/3608/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_b_3_4_last

This list is refreshed every hour so I’m not sure what place you are going to find it at, but at the time of this writing it’s #20.

Help us to move up the list by doing you know what

If you are looking for an alternative solution for to integrate Flex and Java EE layers consider using GraniteDS, WebOrb, and Clear Toolkit. The first two products offer their own implementation of the AMF protocol, and Clear Toolkit uses the AMF libraries that come with BlazeDS . If you are looking for an open source implementation of the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), the Red5 server (currently in version 0.7) may be your option.

The feature matrix below lists compares LCDS, BlazeDS, and open source Clear Toolkit. This feature matrix was created using the data from LCDS/BlazeDS comparison chart published by Adobe .

The current version of Clear Toolkit is 3.2.1. The features that are currently not available but will be implemented in Clear Toolkit version 4 by the end of 2010 and are marked as v4 in the chart below.

Disclaimer. I’m one of the creators of Clear Toolkit. But if the owners of GraniteDS, WebOrb, and Red5 would like to be listed here, please let me know, and I’ll gladly update this feature matrix.

Feature Matrix: Adobe Live Cycle Data Services ES2, BlazeDS 3, Clear Toolkit 3+

*   Farata Systems can develop an NIO based BlazeDS solution on a per-customer basis under a separate consulting agreement. Read and watch performance tests of our high concurrency Jetty/NIO/BlazeDS solution at http://flex.sys-con.com/node/720304

** Currently, Farata Systems is working on a solution for introducing the model-driven development to Clear Toolkit.

*** LCDS offers advanced server-side PDF generation. Clear Toolkit components support PDF generation on the client (WYSIWYG), but does not support working with forms.

**** Adobe doesn’t publish the cost of LCDS ES2 license. The price listed here is taken based on the data shared by current users whose employers allegedly paid (read the comments to the following blog post of Adobe LCDS/BlazeDS Product Manager).

I’ll be demoing Clear Toolkit in action at the Flash and The City conference in May in New York City. If you’ll be in town on May 17, consider attending our hands-on master class on modularization of Flex applications.

Such an unexpected interest to this non-flashy and very technical topic is a good indication that lots of enterprise grade Flex applications are being developed in the real world.

Three days in a row the 360Flex attendees were stopping by just to say “Thank you” for explaining how to slice a Flex application into pieces.

Inspired with such a warm welcome, I’ve created a curriculum for a one day hands-on master class where this topic can be covered from the practitioner’s point of view and in greater details. I know for sure that most of the people who have developed at least one production grade Flex application had to go through the pain of modularizing the application when it was almost ready for production. The goal of this workshop is to help you in designing your application properly in the early stages of the project rather than deciding what to do with this 3MB monster a month before going in production.

This event is scheduled on May 17 in New York City. It’ll take place right after the conference Flash and the City, so consider staying in this great city for yet another day. You won’t regret it.

The ROI of attending this workshop can be pretty substantial. This is a small scale bring-your-own-laptop event and the number of seats is limited – consider registering early at the following Web page: http://bit.ly/cjUaCd.

Yours,
Yakov Fain

Great job, @seantheflexguy! If we had more female Flex developers there, all 365 attendees would be dancing. How about introducing discount for girls at the next #360flex?

During the first part of this keynote the audience thanks speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and John’s wife Nicole for making this conference happen.
The second part of the community keynote is like an annual visit to an accountant. The organizers open up the books. Literally. It’s the moment of truth and transparency. The first slide showed the expenses “the money out”. Then goes the slide with “the money in”, then the pocket change – the difference  between the in and out.  I’m not going to publish these slides here to give Tom and John some room to play before they’ll submit the final numbers to IRS.

I sincerely hope that this public bookkeeping will stop soon, which will be a good indication that Tom and John are finally making some real money for all the hard work they put organizing this excellent independent conference for Flex developers.

There’s one more tradition of the community keynote: Tom announces that this was the last time he was organizing this conference, and he quits. I understand his feelings. I have similar state of mind after finishing writing yet another book. Last month it was the 6th time when I said to myself, “Never again!” But I realize that I’ll write yet another book too.

But let’s observe the protocol and thank Tom for his hard work and say,  “@lordbron good luck in your future endeavors!”

Then the mike goes to Ben Stucki who shows a quick demo of the Reflex framework of components that are a lot lighter than their Flex peer: 40Kb SWF vs. 400KB. Ben, as usual, wears his “always on” baseball cap.  @AmyBlankenship posted the following on Twitter: “Wondering if the top of @BenStucki ’s head exists…”

Now seriously. Ben has very ambitious task. I’m not sure if Reflex will reach production quality any time soon, but I see at least three possible positive outcomes of this effort:

1. Adobe will learn from Reflex how to create lighter Flex components
2. Ben will create a niche job market for his company – the firms that need fast and light components will be hiring him for development of specialized custom components.
3. Tiny SWF may be in demand among the twenty minus one vendors of Smart Mobile devices.

Then I spent half an hour listening to Renaun Ericskon’s talk “ActionScript Tips for iPhone Games.” He’s the guy if you need to optimize your iPhone application written in ActionScript.

When I’ve heard that Adobe open sourced the data visualization code, my naïve mind took the price of Flex Builder Professional ($699 = $249  + datavisualization) and deducted datavisualization. My formula produced the new price, but I’m afraid that Adobe will apply different logic and the price of Flash Builder won’t go lower than $699.

Hint. If you want to be cool this season, keep saying that you never use the Design mode in Flash Builder. Or even better – use IntelliJIdea.

My final three-hour technical session was “Comparing Flex and Silverlight” presented by  Jun Heider and Eric Fickes. These guys did a very good technical comparison of two products. Start taking Silverlight seriously. I’d be very interested to compare the licensing costs of deployment of an enterprise data driven application utilizing binary protocols in Flex/LCDS/BlazeDS vs Silverlight/IIS. Without these numbers it’s hard to recommend one or the other technology to the enterprise customers.

During this presentation I’ve also enjoyed watching the monkey dance of one of the Microsoft’s billionaires.

On the way home, @jefftapper told me that the new version of the Flex 4 Training from the Source book will become available. This time it’ll consist of two parts, and the first part will be available in April. In the past, I bought the Flex 2 and Flex 3 editions of this well written training manual, and will definitely buy the Flex 4 version too.

Summary

Here’s a recap of some things I liked about the #360Flex circa San Jose 2010:
1.    Lot’s of power outlets and extenders.
2.    A vending machine with disabled dollar slot was dispensing the cans for free.
3.    80% of presentations are done by independent Flex developers.
4.    As always, this conference was very friendly and informal

When/where is the next 360flex? Anyone knows? I need to book the flight early.

Yours
Yakov

The morning panel was titled “Principles of RIA” and was about bringing animation and effects to your RIA to make it more engaging. For some reason it didn’t get me excited as I have to deal with more prosaic issues on a daily basis.

The next hour and a half I spent sitting on the floor in the overcrowded room where Deepa was reviewing new features of Flex 4, which were not Spark components.

During the lunch I was invited to speak at a conference in Mexico and discussed specifics of working as a consultant on government projects.

Then, I made a wrong choice because of the misleading title – I was expected to see more advanced stuff, but it was an intro type session. C’mon, stop writing ANT manually – check out our free plugin FX2Ant that generates ANT script from your Flex project in seconds.

My next selection was the session on Test Driven Development (TDD) by Elad Elrom. This was  the best session of the day hands down. There are situations when TDD can save project development cycle. Writing tests before the actual application is written forces people to better understand the application being developed. Ten year ago using UML-based code generators would have a similar effect -  we had to think before code, but we’d had to test code manually.
In the 21-st Century, the legions of low skilled people rushed into software development and the more coding generated and tested automatically the better.

During Elad’s presentation I’ve learned a new term for something that we all experience in the corporate world: Asshole-Driven Development. Here’s the slide on the subject:

The technical part of the day was closed by another panel. This time it was on the business of software – how to estimate development cost, how to talk to clients, how to run teams etc. This topic drew a lot of interest among the developers, but to me, most of the answers were sugarcoated. The panelists were saying the right things, but to my taste, it was not open enough. There is a lot more BS in this area than it was presented.  I liked the comments made by RJ Owen (he was on the panel) – RJ has a good sense of humor.

A couple of takeaways from this session are:

1. Development can be good, fast, and cheap – pick two.
2. When you are developing a project, it’s like working in the construction business. The difference is that instead of wood and bricks you have to use live kittens – they move, play, fight…

The level of the attendees is different. For example, one person told me that he wrote a large Flex application – 8000 lines of code in one file. But he understands that this is not right. In today’s podcast The Flex Show one girl said, “We use a lot of Flex, especially for our front end.” Nice!

Organizers of the conference marked each presentation by a level of complexity: 100, 200, and 300. Mine was marked as 300, but one guy stopped by saying the he loved it even though it was of a level 400. He also said that during the preso I “sold” a lot of our copies of our upcoming book. I was not presenting to sell books, but hey O’Reilly, have you heard this?

At the end of the day I went for dinner to P.F.Chang’s with Shashank, Tom, Jeff, and John and group of other people. Five Adobe evangelists were eating there already. We’ve asked the waiter to give us a table far from them assuming they might need privacy to discuss some secret things, like the date of Flex 4 release. He-he, if they’d read my yesterday’s blog they’d know that I calculated that date already.

For me, it was the second day in a row at P.F.Chang’s. I was the only one who have been there already. At this restaurant, they bring you the bill and fortune cookies at the same time, I guess, to ease the pain.  Shashank’s cookie had something about multi-touch, which is a good sign since he’s presenting on Wed on this subject.

Wednesday is the closing day of the conference.

Another day, another dinner at P.F. Chang’s.

Yours,
Yakov Fain

After a quick check-in to a nice room I spent a couple of hours drinking with a flex crowd in a couple of bars.

The morning after.

The shuttle bus took us to the huge eBay campus. Most of the people on the bus DID NOT have iPhones, can you believe this? Tom was greeting everyone at the door.
Several hundred of people gathered to hear Adobe’s Deepa’s keynote. Her conference badge reads “I’m Deepa”. Nice! On the next conference I’ll steal this idea from her and will carry the tag “I’m Yakov”.

I’ve been looking at this crowd and was thinking to myself, “If Tom and John will keep 360Flex running, in two years it’ll become bigger than Adobe MAX for Flex developers.”

In the morning, I’ve attended a presentation on Web analytics (Google vs. Omniture) and after lunch, my yesterday’s drinking buddy Jesse shared with the grateful audience his use of Flex plus two (!) more frameworks in the same project. Jesse is a good presenter, and I always come to see him regardless of the subject he’s talking about.

At 4PM I delivered a preso titled “Boring Presentation on Libraries and Modules”. A hundred people gathered in the room (here they are), and I was talking for 80 minutes and then was answering questions for another 25 minutes. I was pleasantly surprised that a non-flashy subject of modularization gets such an interest. People started working on decent size enterprise RIA’s and need to properly cut them into pieces.

This presentation was videotaped and sooner or later will become available online. For now, I can offer you a video of its shorter version that I made last year at Flash Camp Wall Street.
The beer was served right at eBay and the networking part began. These are some things that I’d like to share with you.

1. After certain conversations with certain people and by applying the Sherlock Holmes’ method of deductive reasoning I came out with the release date of Flex 4. To be on the safe side, I’ll give you two dates: March 29 or March 31 of 2010. Let’s wait and see if I got it right or I got it right.

2. I met a guy who runs a tiny company of a couple of Flex developers. He was complaining that it’s very difficult for him to find Flex talent for his projects because he couldn’t afford to hire and keep on billing $100 per hour consultants. He was surprised to learn that our company can easily offer him senior (I mean it) Flex/Java developers working remotely for a lot more modest rates. This is not the first time I hear that people assume that Farata Systems works only for Wall Street giants. We have lots of happy customers and the smallest one has only two employees.

3. I met a guy who has a nice visualization piece that may compliment our ClearBI Flex reporter. For some reason, there’s a surge of interest to ClearBI during the last month or so. We haven’t open sourced it yet, but if you want to play with it, here’s the URL of the demo server.  You may find some old screencasts showing how to create a custom report based on the raw grid of data, but try just hitting the buttons on the screen and you should be able to figure out how to add grouping, sorting, computed columns with formulas, and other goodies to create a report to your liking.

The dinner at P.F.Chang with several flexers was closing my first day of this very friendly and high-tech event. Looking forward for today’s learning.

Another day, another framework.

Your’s truly,
Yakov Fain

March 1-2: Advanced Master Class on Flex in Brussels, Belgium. This public 2-day training becomes more and more popular. During the last 8 months we’ve taught this class in New York, Boston, Toronto, London, and Moscow. To the best of my knowledge, no one else offers such an advanced curriculum as public training.  On the night of March 2 I’ll be co-speaking at the Belgium Flex Users Group.

Here’s something you may not know. Viktor Yanukovich, the newly elected President of the Ukraine will visit Belgium on March 1. The real reason is not to  meet political leaders of Belgium and European Union, but to attend our class to become more flexible and invite Farata Systems to teach the same class in Ukraine in June of 2010. We’ll definitely consider this.

March 7-10: On arrival from Belgium, I’ll just have time to laundry my Farata t-shirts and have a couple of dinners with my family, and then board the next flight to San Jose, CA. Yep, it’s time for 360Flex conference, which as of today is my favorite Flex gathering. This is a No BS event. For independent developers by independent developers. 40 sessions, 2 panels, 4 Sunday Hands-On sessions. Networking. Beer. Good energy.  Solid technical content.I even recorded a 40-sec video to share with you my excitement!

I’ll deliver an interesting and useful for enterprise Flex developers talk titled “Boring presentation on Flex libraries and modules”.  The rest of the time I’ll spend in the meeting rooms listening to what other developers are up to.

In the evening, I’ll be glad to join you for a Johny Walker. Be there. Join several hundreds of Flex developers who are in the know!

Yours truly
Yakov Fain

The inexpensive ($6K per CPU) departmental license is discontinued. LCDS Express edition is gone.

Get ready to pay around $30K per CPU for Enterprise LCDS 3 license.  It’s really sad that Adobe marketing is killing a great product created by Adobe software engineers.

After reading the chain of comments to the blog of Anil Channappa, LCDS and BlazeDS project manager,  it seems that Adobe does everything to ensure that our open source Clear Toolkit with BlazeDS will become even more popular.

Clear Data Builder (the flagship piece of Clear Toolkit) generates both Flex and Java code from POJO or SQL, supports data sync between different users (yep, with ChangeObjects under the hood), does the server side data push over AMF, knows how to deal with master-detail (hierarchical) collections, supports transactions, has smart  DataForm and Validator components.  We also know how to make BlazeDS scale to support many concurrent users.

Almost forgot, we have generators for AS3 classes from their Java peers and a generator of ANT build scripts from your Flex Builder projects.

Do you know the cost of Clear Toolkit per CPU? You got it. It’s zero dollars, euros, rubles and rupees.

At the time of this writing Clear Toolkit doesn’t support Model-Driven development…Read my lips.

If there is a customer who wants to hire us and shell a little bit of cash for R & D, we can add a support of RTMP too (shared copyright only).

Adobe also stopped offering commercial support of BlazeDS. Well, you know where to go for this.

Some companies have short memories. When Flex own by Macromedia, was server-side only and priced at $15K, nobody knew about this product. After the merger in late 2005, Adobe did a really smart move by moving this great tool to the client side with reasonably priced Flex Builder.  Now, it looks like Adobe re-hired those old Macromedia salesmen. Big mistake.Huge.

Yakov Fain
P.S. I’d like to use this opportunity and invite Flex developers living in Europe to attend our Advanced Flex Master Class in Brussels, Belgium on March 1 and 2, 2010. We still have a couple of seats available.

The main power of BlazeDS is its binary AMF protocol that seamlessly serializes strongly typed data between Flex and Java. Just think of the typical use case described below.

A POJO on the server side gets a bunch of Customer.java records (say, ArrayList) from a data source and needs to display them as a grid in a Web Browser. With a regular HTML/JavaScript Web application you’d need to convert the customers’ data into some kind of text representation (losing the data types information of customer data), then GZip the data, send them to the client, and using JavaScript manipulations convert the data into appropriate data types for further processing.

You don’t need to do any of these while sending the data from Java on the server to Flex on the client. The ArrayList of customers gets serialized/deserialized into an ActionScript ArrayCollectoin of strongly typed data transfer objects defined in the class Customer.as.

HTTP batching and streaming is a combination of few technologies with a close resemblance to how car traffic is controlled on some highways. There are dedicated lanes for high-occupancy vehicles (HOV) that move faster during the rush hours. Such HOV lanes can be compared to the
HTTP channels opened for streaming. For example, you can program network communications in such way that one channel allows only two data pushes per second (a guaranteed QoS), while the other channel will try to push all the data, which may cause network congestion, delays, and queuing.

With AMF, the data gets loaded faster than with nonbatched requests/responses. And it plays nicely with the typical infrastructures that use firewalls as it piggybacks on the existing browser HTTP requests.

However, for critical HTML/JavaScript applications a problem remains: there is no QoS provided by HTTP protocol, which may become a showstopper. For example, think of a financial application that sends real-time price quotes to the users. The server keeps sending messages, regardless of the current throughput of the network, which in case of network congestion will be causing problems with queues overruns or lost packages.

Recently released LCDS 3 has introduced features to support reliable messaging and throttling, while BlazeDS won’t have it. This is when opensourceness of Flex and BlazeDS becomes handy, because it allows you to customize communication protocols to perfectly meet all the needs of your application and squeeze out a lot more performance from BlazeDS than it’s advertised by Adobe.

How do you even start customizing network protocols? Even the idea of doing this sounds scary, right? It won’t be, if you’ll attend our Master Class in Brussells, Belgium in March: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/527934065. We are planning to run a couple of more if these events in the USA too. Let me throw in some technical terms now since not everyone can appreciate the quality of the Belgium beer yet.

If you open the server-side configuration file services-config.xml that comes with BlazeDS, you’ll find declarations of several communication channels there, for example:

<channel-definition id="my-amf" class="mx.messaging.channels.AMFChannel">
 <endpoint url="http://{server.name}:{server.port}/{context.root}/messagebroker/amf" class="flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint"/>
</channel-definition>

This is an example of configured AMF communication channel. There are three important notions to understand here.

1. AMF operates using messaging under the hood. When you make an RPC call to a remote Java class (a.k.a. destination). Flash Player sends messages to the server, and you can change the way messages are being formed or processed.

2. On the client side (Flex) the ActionScript class a.k.a. channel can be customized, if need be. In the example above this would be the class mx.messaging.channel.AMFChannel.

3. On the server side, there are two Java classes that can be customized: an endpoint (see above flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint) and adapter.

Let’s say, you want to ensure that every message header includes a userID that has been authenticated during the logon process, you can do it by customizing the channel and the endpoint classes. This way you won’t need to pass the user ID with every application-specific RPC call.

Two years ago, one of our financial clients was concerned with potential out-of-sequence messages in a trading workflow. Back than it was the application based on LCDS 2.5, which didn’t offer any support in this area. We’ve customized the channel and adapter to provide this functionality. We’ve also implemented throttling to slow down the message pushes in congestion situations. The same things can be implemented with BlazeDS.

Or let’s take another real-world situation when an extra security is required: the client’s workstation has to be automatically logged off and disconnected, if the server didn’t respond during a specified time interval. To put it simple, we need to implement some kinds of heartbeats. Yes, you can customize the AMF protocol so it’ll process heartbeats between the Flex client and Java server.

Didn’t respond to my heartbeat within 20 second? You’re a dead man! The user get’s logged out of the system.

Need better performance with BlazeDS? Introduce a non-blocking I/O.
How about an idea of a reverse RPC call? I mean what I mean. A Java server calls a specified function on the user’s (Flex) application passing whatever arguments are required by the function.

“You may say, I’m a dreamer. But I’m not the only one”, sang John Lennon.

For some reason, most of the RIA developers are into flashy UI as it’s considered to be uber cool. But don’t underestimate the power of the networking protocols in general and of AMF in BlazeDS in particular. At least I know, where the power of Flex and Java EE application is hidden.

Yakov Fain

To take advantage of the early bird prices register early at http://bit.ly/59DdIU.

If you can’t make it to Brussells, I’ll be glad to meet with you at 360 Flex in San Jose, CA on March 7-10, where I’ll be presenting on one of the topic from this master class.

If you can’t make it to San Jose, I’ll be very happy to meet you at Flash and the City conference in May in New York City. Most likely I’ll show you a really cool way of embedding a Flex application into a PDF file to be played by Acrobat Reader.

If none of these dates/locations work for you, you can always invite us to teach this class privately on site in your organization almost anywhere on the planet Earth.

Yours
Yakov Fain

1.    Give a serious bonus to software engineers who created Fiber, a set of goodies behind model-driven development.  Way to go!

2.    Fire that guy who already reached his level of incompetency and said, “If one salesman can sell LCDS licenses for $20K a CPU, everyone can do it”. This  guy is simply killing the product by making it unreachable for lots and lots of corporate clients. Change your state of mind from “these filthy rich Wall Street client should pay” to “each RIA project manager has limited budget”. BTW, have you heard of recession that we are still in?
Remember, when Adobe purchased Macromedia and changed the Flex pricing policy from $15K per server to $700 per IDE people actually started using the product? Why not trying the old trick again?

3.    Charge LCDS evangelists with changing their main message from “Look Ma, No Hands” to “Unleash the superpower of RTMP and custom adapters”. Today, they are preaching to the wrong crowd. Flex enthusiasts who don’t know Java and are developing cool Web sites for their cousins’ video stores won’t be buying LCDS licenses no matter how high you jump. They’ll be happy to use the new Modeler in Flash Builder 4 as a cookie cutter, with free LCDS express edition.

4.    Invest more money in QA to ensure that Fiber’s code generators are not just well written, but are of superb quality. It’s great that you’ve eliminated the need to write Java and configure destinations on the server – people who are not capable of learning Java will applaud you. But generating the in-memory-only code and not giving developers a chance to debug it (if something goes wrong in the generated code) requires top notch quality code interpreter and code generators.  In the 90th, I’ve had excellent experience with  PowerBuilder (Sybase) that did a great job in this department where everything worked as the doctor ordered. But I also had bad experience with BEA System’s Java Workbench IDE that at some point started giving null pointers in the code that was not written by me and was not accessible by debugger.

5.    Usually, enterprise Flex/LCDS developers have to work with existing persistence layers. In Java world, Hibernate and EJB dominate there. Fiber also uses Hibernate in the model-driven development workflow. But what if developers are not allowed to work with DBMS directly and have to use a pre-existing Hibernate layer? It’s not clear how Fiber will  use an existing Hibernate configuration vs. generating a new one.

6.     Ensure that enterprise RIA architects are familiar with such advantages of LCDS over BlazeDS as duplex-by-nature RTMP, reliable messaging, and throttling.  BTW, did I mention that you need to lower the price of the enterprise LCDS license to $5K a CPU?

7.    Start promoting the importance of the load testing on early phases of any RIA project and explain how to use of the new LCDS Java NIO testing tool. Use the lose-weight selling strategy: show the picture of a Flex/LCDS application Before and After.

8.    Purchase Charles monitoring tool and enhance it to allow enterprise  developers to monitor and dissect RTMP calls.

9.    Allow your Flex evangelists publicly admit that even though developer can use MVC Flex frameworks even with Model-driven workflow where the application is generated automatically, it doesn’t bring much value. Really.

10. Ask LCDS evangelists to create a reference implementation of the popular among Java developers Pet Store. Get the existing version over here and do a facelift using Flex and LCDS 3. But make it real including the coverage of all little details that Java EE developers want to know (i.e. how to integrate the new application with existing authentication/authorization service like SiteMinder).

“Wow, Yakov, you came up with a really nice laundry list! What do I owe you?”
“Kevin, if you still have some money left after acquiring Omniture, please send a case of Louis XIII cognac my way. But if you are still recovering, I understand. A case of  Cardenal Mendoza is just fine”.

Yakov Fain

About a year ago Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood released a well designed and easy to follow knowledge exchange stackoverflow.com, where people earn reputation by suggesting the right solutions to people’s problems. Flex/Flash/Air developers started to post their questions there among the plethora of questions on other technologies and programming languages.

Joel and Jeff went one step further and are offering the engine (stackexchange) for creation of similar knowledge exchanges for discussion any kinds of subjects. Using this engine is not free, but our company, Farata Systems continues contributing to Flex community and will pick up the cost involved with running the knowledge dedicated to RIA technologies that produce applications to be deployed with Flash Player.

We are just starting and created a an exchange Built4Flash on stackexchange engine and would like to invite Flex, Flash, AIR, and Coldfusion developers to post questions there and provide answers to others. The URL of the Web site is http://built4flash.stackexchange.com.

Your questions and answers not only will help others in solving their issues, but you’ll also have a chance to  become visible and reputable person in this lively and Flashy community.

I really hope you’ll support this initiative.

Yakov Fain

Some of you would think, “Yakov is either out of his mind or is writing this blog sitting in one of the coffeshops in Amsterdam”. Wrong! I’m just reading an announcement about the upcoming release of the popular Adobe framework Cairngorm 3: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cairngorm/Cairngorm+3

Based on this announcement, even if you are using PureMVC, Swiz, Mate, or whatever else will be invented in the future, you are using Caingorm. Basically, instead of addressing issues of the Cairngorm 2 framework, someone decided to reuse a well recognized brand in rather small Flex community (about 250K developers) and turn it into a set of guidelines.

The Getting Started document reads, “The original Cairngorm library remains a part of Cairngorm 3, but has not been updated for this release.” Two paragraphs down it states, “To migrate from Cairngorm 2 to 3, you should first read the Cairngorm Guidelines to understand how your existing client-side architecture might be improved. This could involve introducing an inversion-of-control container or simply refining the way you use the original Cairngorm library.”

Now I’m confused. If Cairngorm 2 was a framework and Cairngorm 3 is not, what this improvement from 2 to 3 means? Introduction of IoC simply means throwing away Cairngorm 2 in favor of Parsley, Swiz or Mate. Am I missing something?
Cairngorm 3 includes the following libraries: Observer, Popup, Task, Validation, Integration, Module, Navigation.  Several of them “are implemented as extensions of Parsley Application Framework. In order to take advantage of these libraries, you also need to use Parsley”. Wait a minute. Do I need to use both Cairngorm and Parsely on top of Flex framework? If before, you should’ve added to the project one swc of the selected framework, now you’ll need to add a bunch of them. Are we going to build a pyramid of frameworks or something?
Cairngorm tools include Flex Builder (I assume Flash Builder too), Cairngorm 2, FlexCover, FlexPMD, Flex-Mojo for Maven… What if they decide to use our open source ANT script generator Fx2Ant and include it in Cairngorm too? Is this a good thing?

Yesterday, I’ve attended an interesting presentation about disruptive thinking, where presenter kept asking, “What if you could fly?” Applying the same technique, I’m asking myself,  “What if I’m Cairngorm?”

Tried it several times. It doesn’t work so far. Sure, I’ve gained some weight, but it’s too soon to call myself a mountain. But I’ll be there! I can do it! We need a change! For now, I’ll just use this word as my middle name:

Yakov Cairngorm Fain.

Sounds good, isn’t it?

“Does Adobe provide enterprise support for BlazeDS?
We have seen tremendous adoption growth with BlazeDS. However, feedback suggests that the support offerings did not meet the needs of our customers. Therefore, we are no longer offering subscription support for BlazeDS. Instead, customers who require maintenance and support can purchase LiveCycle Data Services ES2. Current customers under a valid support subscription of BlazeDS will have the option to trade up to LiveCycle Data Services ES2 when their maintenance and support agreement comes to an end.”

Over the last two years, Farata Systems was offering various solutions based on BlazeDS often enhancing and extending capabilities of BlazeDS. We are very familiar with the source code of BlazeDS and our Flex and Java experts can support all the needs of your organization around BlazeDS. Support options include all range of services starting from training and first level support to bug fixing and feature enhancements.

Your organization can provide the first level support for the users of the application built with BlazeDS, and Farata Systems takes care of the second level technical support.

Farata Systems can offer your organization the following services:
– a dedicated personnel – 24×7 with limited number of issues/contacts at your organization
– Prepaid blocks of time in 40-hour increments for access to out Flex networking specialists on priority basis
- Customization of the BlazeDS communication protocols if need be
- Increasing of the performance and scalability of BlazeDS-based applications, for an example,
read the following article
- Guaranteed support for 1 year based on product development, with fixed support price thereafter

For more details please fill out the Contact Us form at http://www.faratasystems.com.

This upcoming Monday, I’ll be speaking at the Flash Camp Wall Street in New York City. It has great speakers and the best part is that there’s only has one track so attendees will have nowhere to hide from my talk described below:

A boring presentation on Flex libraries and modules

Everyone have heard of RSLs and “Merged into code” link options. But do you really see the connection between the library linkage and your enterprise application performance? Do you know what and when goes over the wire to your users? Do you really understand the difference between the RSL and External linking of Flex libraries? Do you know when to use libraries and when to use modules? Do you know the difference between modules and sub-applications? Do you know how to arrange for a smarter RSL downloads? If you answered “Yes” to most of these questions, don’t waste your time attending this presentation cause it’ll be so boooring for you.

In two weeks my colleague Victor and I will be teaching our advanced Flex 2-day workshop that becomes more and more popular. Moscow, Russia becomes our next destination after New York, Boston, Toronto and London.  If you can read Russian, here’s the link for you. In the first quarter of 2010 we are planning to run it in Warsaw, Poland and Kiev, Ukraine.
One person told me that it’s stupid to go to freezing Moscow in December. No biggies. We like cold vodka.

In March, I’ll be presenting at 360 Flex in San Jose . I love this conference for developers and by developers. If  I’d be sentenced to spend the rest of my life in a desert island and was allowed to take only one Flex conference with me, I’d take 360 Flex.  During this event I’ll show a cool little Flex application that lives inside the PDF and is played by Acrobat Reader.

Flash and the City is the new kid on the block.  Check it out: http://www.flashandthecity.com/#page=AllSpeakers .  Excellent faculty and aggressive pricing will bring several hundreds of Flex and Flash developers to New York City.  If everything goes as planned, I’ll be able to demo something that’s slowly brewing at Farata Systems under the working title “Fluid PDF Forms”. Duane Nickull’s band 22nd Century will be on stage helping attendees to forget everything they’ve learned in the classrooms.

I’ve mentioned just the conferences where I’m involved as a speaker. But there will be plenty of other gatherings of Flex developers during the same period of time. Be there.

Yakov Fain

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

Yakov Fain

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

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

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

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

Yakov Fain

Yakov Fain

Stay tuned.

Yakov Fain

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…

Stay tuned.

Yakov Fain

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

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

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