Category: Archive

During the last week I had to interview five developers for a position that required the following skills: Flex, Java, Spring, and Hibernate. Most of these guys had demonstrated the 3 out of 10 level of Flex skills even though each of them claimed a practical experience on at least two projects. But this didn “t surprise me ndash; Flex is still pretty new and there is only a small number of developers on the market who can really get Flex things done.

What surprised me the most is a low level of Java skills of most of these people. They have 5-8 years of Java EE project behind their belts, but they were not Java developers. They were species that I can call Robot-Configurator. Each of them knew how to configure XML files for Spring, they knew how to hook up Spring and Hibernate and how to map a Java class to a database entity. Some of them even knew how to configure lazy loading in Hibernate even though not all understood why it “s needed.

Two out of five developers who claimed seniority in Java proved to have a mid-level understanding of this programming language. The other three really disappointed me. They didn “t even know the basics of Java hellip;One of them had no idea of what the interfaces are for. The other one was still killing a thread by calling a deprecated 10 years ago method stop(), the third guy had issues explaining the data flow of a standard Web application built with Servlets and JDBC.

Next time you “ll be interviewing a Java guru, ask him/her the following question, “There is an HTML form with a button Submit, a servlet and a relational database with the table Customers. The users enters a First and Last names of the customer, presses the button Submit, and you need to write the code that would return the detailed data about this customer. Explain IN DETAILS the entire data flow and the HTML/Java processing you “d need to perform. rdquo;

Do not forget to repeat that the candidate is not allowed to use neither Spring, nor Hibernate. You might be surprised…

I like Java, and it “s sad to see these herds of creatures who truly believe that they are Java developers. They aren “t

Update. This blog has been also published as an article in Java Developer ‘s Journal. It has ignited an interesting discussion: http://flex.sys-con.com/node/1040135

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A perspective client showed me a Web page from Adobe “s Connect Now. Check this page out before reading further: https://connectnow.acrobat.com/

“Yakov, I want our new application to be like that one. The page comes up really fast and it “s very responsive. Can you create our Flex application for us that will be really, really fast? ”

“Yes, I can but it requires planning, and applying special modularization techniques rdquo;.

Later on, this client “s Web designer shows a well-done design that has a dashboard as a starting page of that RIA. Several nice-looking charts, some aggregated data from database, some data grids. Looks good.

When I asked her to design another yet light-weight view to serve as a home page of that RIA, she resisted ndash; “I want to have very clean design that shouldn “t have anything that is not relevant for the application. rdquo;

“No problem, but in this case your application will come up a lot slower than that Connect Now page. That page, if you remember has almost nothing there rdquo;.

“But you said you can do it as fast as Acrobat Connect, aren “t you? rdquo;

“Yes, I did, but Acrobat Connect “s main page does not have charts, it doesn “t process thousands of database records, isn “t it? rdquo;

But guys at Adobe designed that page in a smart way to make the users happy. It not that important if they “ll have to wait (later) for a couple of seconds when the actual work will have to be done hellip;But it “s L-A-T-E-R. That page is perceived to be fast.

Using a dashboard as a starting view of your application means sending over the wire at least one extra 500Kb+ file: datavisualization.swc . If you are using third party graphic libraries, this belly fat can turn into something closer to one meg or even more.

“But I “ve heard that Flex framework can be cached on the user “s computer rdquo;

“True, but this is correct for the users who have already worked with yours or someone else “s Flex application that was deployed with datavisualization library as signed RSL (a SWZ file). But there are always users with virgin computers that won “t have that datavisualization library installed. Remember, you only get one chance to make a first expression! rdquo;

That “s why, we recommend designing any Flex application as a portal with a very light main page, that gradually, in the background brings other RSLs while the user enjoys working with the main view.

The other very important thing that some IT developers managers must not forget ndash; it “s the SLA. Yes, it the same old service level agreement. And it must be in writing. For example, “The first view of the RIA should be displayed in under 20 second for a user sitting at the 1Mbps Internet connection. rdquo; Now we are talking. If you have it in writing and signed off by the users, no one will blame you for delivering a RIA that “feels kinda slow rdquo;.

“Thank you, Yakov. Does your company offer some mentoring or an advanced Flex training classes where our developers can learn all these tricks? rdquo;

“Yes, we do. I will be talking about performance and other most important usability features of Flex next week at our two-day Advanced Flex training in Toronto that “ll take place next week. During such events we share lots of tricks and techniques for delivering large but responsive enterprise application. ”

I know, this is an outrageous into-the-face infomercial, and hopefully the $100 discount code vzw100 will put a smile back on your face when you “ll enter it at the registration page over here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/353452185

Can “t make it to Toronto? How about a one day symposium New York City on August 7 http://www.eventbrite.com/event/355645746:

Don “t feel like flying to this great but a little crazy city either?

No problem. We can fly to your city and help you with your Flex project on site.

The choice is yours.

If you didn “t hear that Google has announced that in 2010 consumers will have a chance to enjoy new Chrome-based OS, stop reading and do you homework first.

Done? Now we can move on, and let “s do it by the rules ndash; positive things first, then some bile followed by a happy end.

I really like Google. They produce easy to use applications that work great. I use their search engine about a hundred times a day. Their applications make sense.

Nine months ago they released a Web browser called Chrome, and I liked it. Back than I suggested that in a year “Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser ‘s market rdquo;.

I was wrong. They “ve bitten a really small piece of the browser “s pie. For lots of companies 3% of any market would be like money from home, but for Google it “s a failure. Now they say that 30M people downloaded this browser. Not too much assuming that there are like 700M computers connected to the internet worldwide. Do you math. I was one of these 30M downloaders. But I don “t use it. Still waiting for some compelling reason to abandon FireFox 3.5.

Now let “s consider a lot more complicated than a Web browser software – the OS. Wall Street commercials often include the following phrase, “Past performance is no guarantee of the future results rdquo;. But in case of the Chrome-based OS we haven “t seen even the “past performance rdquo; so only a miracle can lead to the promised “future results rdquo; a year from now.

Many people are quick to blame Microsoft Windows for anything and everything. Have you ever heard something like “MAC OS is cool. Widows is a piece of junk rdquo;? As a matter of fact, I “m typing this blog using MS Word installed on my MacBook Pro. BTW, the MAC OS version of MS Word has a lot of room for improvement, but it “s besides the point here.

But let “s not blame old and out of style Windows too fast. Keep in mind that every Windows OS had to work on a HUGE variety of hardware produced by a plethora of vendors. Their life was never as easy as Apple “s who created one computer and one OS to this computer. Feel the difference? To the best of my knowledge, Google haven “t created their own computer yet (google phone doesn “t count), but they are planning to enter a Wild West of netbook PCs. Will their OS work only on some models? When will the drivers to my Cannon printer and Fujitsu scanner work with Google OS?

What about MS Office for those stubborn millions of corporate users that don “t want to switch to Google “s online word processors and spreadsheets? The business users are pretty comfy with coding their little formulas in MS Excel. It took them YEARS to master these what-if scenarios and total/subtotal functionality in their tiny under-the-table reports they “re proud of.

For a company with 10000 employees saving $45 on each OS license translates into a substantial sum of money. But why 15+ year old Linux still didn “t make it into a consumer “s market? Agree the first 10 years Linux distributions didn “t have an intuitive GUI. But now there are several flavors of Linux with a decent UI. It “s also free and open source. A handful of geeks enjoy every minute they spend in Linux, but for those Excel users it “s a completely different universe that they don “t care about.

Sure enough, Google will come up with an intuitive UI, but that little kid will never switch to a Google OS computer if his Street Fighter won “t work there. Will Adobe rush to develop the Google OS version of Photoshop by the end of 2008? I don “t think so.

Speaking of the Google OS open source announcement that is embraced by everyone who see nothing but the word “free rdquo; in it hellip;I read it a little differently ndash; Google doesn “t want to commit substantial human resources for this serious undertaking and is betting on kids-enthusiasts who will contribute the new features and patches to the source control repository.

Am I “m painting the picture with unnecessary dark colors?

OK, here “s a couple of positive sprinkles.

1. I do believe that Google will be able to create installable small kernel that will include only the networking and I/O modules absolutely required to quicly start the netbook and connect to the Internet. Google OS will pull the rest of its required modules later, over the wire in the background while the user is still thinking, “Why did I open even the netbook now? rdquo; or on as-needed basis. Remember how Baron Munchhausen have used his own bootstrap to pull himself out of a lake by his own hair? If Baron Munchausen could do it, Google can do it too.

2. Google can use their super-duper advertising machine to promote their new toy. To give you a perspective, Microsoft is spending for marketing of their new search engine Bing a sum that, as Ballmer put it is “big enough that I had to gulp when I approved it. ” And Bullmer doesn “t gulp seeing anything less than $1B. 
If Linux had access to such marketing machine, they “d bee in a much better shape now.

Having said all that, I “ll stick to my general approach, “The more the merrier rdquo;, and I wholeheartedly wish Google to pull it off if not in 2010 then by 2012 or even by 2015.

Go Google, Go!

During the last several years our company, Farata Systems have architected and developed a number of Flex projects ranging from creating widgets for startups to large applications having two hundred views. Some projects were created from scratch, and we had a luxury to do it our way. In some cases we had to pick up the code left by other developers.

Three years ago Adobe Flex has been completely revamped (I “m referring to Flex 2) and nobody knew about it. But today, the word Flex doesn “t make Java developers angry any longer. Java/Flex projects are considered business as usual. Many enterprise Java developers went through Flex training and are ready to roll up their sleeves hellip;

After spending 10+ years with Java I can easily put myself in the state of mind of Java developers – they often start with selecting the right framework. As a matter of fact, our perspective customers often request to include an item “Flex framework analysis and recommendations ” in the agenda of our very first joint meeting. Here “s a typical conversation that takes place during such meetings:

“Yakov, we have a team of experienced Java developers and some of them have exposure to Flex. Which Flex MVC framework do you recommend? By the way, does the ABC framework support XYZ functionality? ”

“No, MVC-based frameworks don ‘t support any additional functionality that doesn “t exist in Flex. Their goal is to rearrange your code and change the way components of your RIA communicate with each other. But why do you need an MVC framework for your project? rdquo;

“Well, everyone “s using them. Having a framework makes the project development more structured and organized. rdquo;

Is it so?

Most of the Flex MVC frameworks are intrusive and require developers to write additional code just to support the life cycle of the framework itself. Usually, they are built on singletons, and this complicates modularization of the RIA. I “ve been writing and speaking against Flex MVC frameworks for years, and if you “d like to read a detailed analysis and comparison of some of them, read the first chapter of the book “Enterprise Development with Flex rdquo;.

Last year at MAX “08 conference, I participated in the panel “The Flex architecture faceoff rdquo;. Two out of four panelists (Chafic Kazoun and yours truly) were advocating component-based approach without squeezing a RIA inside any MVC framework. It was a lively discussion, and you can listen to its recording at http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f15384v1055

At this point you may say, “OK, it “s easy to critique frameworks, but how do you approach development of a new project especially while having a distributed team of developers with minimal exposure to Flex? rdquo;

And I “m glad you “ve asked this question.

In this article I “ll try to identify common artifacts that exist in literally every Flex enterprise project. I “ll also highlight major principles and introduce you to a component-based approach that our developers use in almost every project.

Flex to Java Communication Protocols

The role of Java side of RIA is to deal with data: get the data from a DBMS, a Web Service or any other data source and deliver it to the Flex client as quickly as possible. The fastest way of arranging Java-Flex data exchange is AMF or RTMP protocols. The open source AMF protocol is built on top of HTTP and it offers efficient data serialization between Flex and Java. RTMP offers faster socket-based full duplex communication.

If you install an open source server-side component BlazeDS under a servlet container of your choice, or will use Granite Data Services – AMF will be your only option for data transfer. Commercial LiveCycle Data Services ES (LCDS) will give you both RTMP and AMF implementations. LCDS will also offer you an automated way of data synchronization between Flex and Java.

There is a small number of high performing enterprise applications that would really benefit from using RTMP protocol, and beside using LCDS, an open source server Red5 may become the only alternative.

Note. RTMP protocol is also widely used for streaming video, but these applications are out of the scope of this article.

Challenges of Flex/Java enterprise projects

Let “s dissect a typical enterprise application that “s built with Flex on the client and Java on the server. If you are leading such a project, it “ll present the following tasks, needs, haves, and nice to haves:

1. Keep track of changes that the user makes via UI controls and send modified data to the server

2. It “ll have a number of views that will display the data in the form of grids

3. It “ll have a number of views that will contain forms

4. Some views will represent master-detail relations, i.e. selection of a row in a grid has to display the detail information in a form container.

5. The data grid columns will need custom item renderers ranging from centered checkboxes to dropdowns populated with some reference data by making a separate remote call to the server.

6. It would be nice if a form component could have its own data provider similar to the one that List-based controls use.

7. Data forms must be validated and it would be nice to have

a) reusable validators (i.e. two date fields should be able to reuse the same instance or the Validator object)

b) embedded validators, encapsulated in component such as DataGrid.

8. The main view of your application must appear on the user “s screen ASAP even if they have slow Internet connections.

9. The data changes made by one user may need to be automatically synchronized with the server and notification of the changes should be sent to other users potentially looking working with the same data set at the moment. This functionality is supported by Data Management Services in LCDS, but you may want to have the same functionality in open source BlazeDS.

10. If you are building an AIR/BlazeDS application, you need to come up with a custom solution for automatic data synchronization for occasionally connected applications.

11. Printing is an Achilles heel of Flex. You “d like to be able to generate PDF on the client for your Flex/BlazeDS or disconnected AIR applications.

12. Since your modularized application may consist of five-ten-fifteen Flash Builder projects, writing build scripts becomes a project in its own. Can writing script be automated?

13. Your Flex project may need to consume a dozen or more of Java data transfer objects hence you need to develop the same number of ActionScript classes for efficient data serialization. During the project development cycle the structure of these DTOs may change if not daily, then weekly. An automation tool for generation of DTOs can save you some project development time.

14. Some of the views in your application represent CRUD functionality and using code generators or wizards that lower the amount of manual coding is highly desirable.

15. How do I link all these libraries ndash; RSL/Merge-in/External? Should I use Flex SDK as RSL?

Over the years, we at Farata Systems came up with our solutions to all of the items from the above laundry list. At this point every other reader would exclaim, “Finally, here comes the selling part. I knew it! rdquo;

Wrong! All of the components implementing the above functionality not only are available for free, but we also open sourced them as Clear Toolkit framework and (see SourceForge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/ ).

Now I will write yet another list of solutions that you might want to research further. By the way, even though we call our components a framework, you can use most of them ala cart.

How we deal with challenges of Flex/Java enterprise projects

We “ve created and are happy to share with the community a number of handy classes, tools, and techniques. You can get the code, which has been open sourced, and you can read our books and articles describing how to use them.

I “ll give you quick references that help in finding solutions to the above challenges (I “ll keep the same order and numbering).

1. Clear Toolkit has a library clear.swc, which has a component DataCollection that supports automatic tracking of the user changes. Look at the ChangeObject class ndash; we “ve implemented it similarly to the one in LCDS, but ours can be used with BlazeDS too. If you need to make your updates transactional, use the BatchService class.

2. We use DataCollection (a subclass of ArrayCollection) as a data provider for data grids. Besides keeping tracks of changes, it encapsulates Flex remoting and reduces the amount of manual coding.

3. Research the DataForm component. Read about it in the sample chapter mentioned at the end of this article.

4. DataCollection supports proper updates in Master-Detail scenarios (see http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=407).

5. Read about resources in the sample chapter mentioned at the end of this article.

6. Read about DataForm component in the sample chapter mentioned at the end of this article.

7. Read about Validator component in the sample chapter mentioned at the end of this article.

8. Read about custom preloaders and how to build every application as a mini-portal with a light-weight starting application in Chapter 8 of the upcoming O “Reilly book.

9. Read about DataCollection in general and hierarchical data collections with deep data synchronization in particular (http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=407)

10. Read about the OfflineDataCollection (Chapter 9 of the upcoming book) and see a pre-recorded demo of a sample application that “s using it (http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=394 ).

11. Explore the Clear Toolkit “s package com.farata.printing ndash; it includes extended Flex components that can expose themselves in a format suitable for PDF generation. Read chapter 11 of the upcoming book for more details and samples.

12. An approach and techniques of minimizing the download time is described in Chapter 8 of the upcoming book.

13. Explore our DTO2Fx code generator that comes with Clear Toolikt: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/files/

14. Read about Clear Data Builder 3.1 that can generate the entire CRUD application based on either SQL or arbitrary Java DTO “s at https://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/files/

15. Read chapters 7 and 8 about linking libraries and loading modules in Flex RIA.

Where can I learn more about these solutions?

First, you can read the book Rich Internet Applications (http://riabook.com/) with Adobe Flex and Java that I co-authored with Anatole and Victor, my colleagues at Farata.

Second, you should read an upcoming O “Reilly book Enterprise development with Flex, written by the same authors.

Third, you may explore the source code of Clear Toolkit components and use the tools published at SourceForge.

Fourth, we invite you to enroll in Advanced Flex trainings, seminars and symposiums that we run on a regular basis. During these events we demonstrate most of the techniques mentioned above as well as our latest findings. Find the up-to-date information about such events under the Training section at http://faratasystems.com/

Fifth, read our blog at http://flexblog.faratasystems.com

To get a better feeling about the functionality of some of the extended Flex components, please read the sample chapter of the upcoming book Enterprise development with Flex. O “Reilly decided to publish this chapter as a three-part blog under my name, but I was only one of three co-authors, and all of us are accountable for these texts. Read the sample chapter here:

Part 1. http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/chapter-preview-building-an-en.html

Part 2. http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/building-an-enterprise-framewo.html

Part 3. http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/building-an-enterprise-framewo-1.html

Summary

I just want to give a full credit to my colleagues, excellent software engineers at Farata that work day in and day out on enhancing the functionality of Flex components and decreasing the amount of manual coding required by application programmers. Open sourcing our component have allowed us to bring more people to testing (our big thanks to people who use Clear Toolkit and report issues and make suggestions at Source Forge forums).

We invite Flex and Java developers to become active contributors and submit their version of enhanced components to make Clear Toolkit, a real platform for all who value open source solutions. There are no geniuses that can beat the collective intelligence!

On many occasions I “ve been writing that there is almost no women at the IT conferences, and it “s sad. Unfortunately, some presenters treat women as second class citizens and don “t think twice before using dirty jokes and images right from the podium.

Please read this post about Flash Developers Conference in Minneapolis.

I haven “t been there, but if the authors of this post are telling the truth, this presenter should be banned from participating in the future conferences.

If you are meeting organizer, think twice before approving paper submission from him.

Information Week has published an interview with GM “s CIO discussing the impact of the bankruptcy on the two-billion-IT operations of this huge corporation .

After reading this article, I “m pretty sure that GM “s IT is doomed. The chances are slim that they will turn themselves into leaner and agile organization as it should be in 21st century.

The article reveals “In 2006, GM awarded about $7B (!) in IT contracts to EDS, Capgemini, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and others, and earmarked another $7 billion or so for additional contracts in following years. Szygenda has a history of demanding that outsourcers change their operational practices to fit GM “s needs. One example is their creation of global teams to work on GM accounts rdquo;.

Now let me explain how I read this interesting paragraph. These leeches , a.k.a. global consulting firms were charging $200p/h for mediocre consultants and were able to suck $7B worth of blood out of GM and are ready to continue enjoying the party. If you “ll tell me that I “m going over board with $200, let me explain how it might looked on paper ndash; five inexpensive offshore resources at $40p/h each. Can you imagine, in India you can hire a project manager for only $40p/h! It “s like dream come true.Who cares, that one senior developer could have done the same job for $100p/h without the need to even hire the team of five…

But let me ask you, my dear typical Fortune-500 CIO, “Why did you need that project manager in the first place? rdquo;

“Yakov, don “t act silly. He “d manage a team of 4 developers for this job rdquo;

“Why did you need this team? rdquo;

“It “s required as per the approved architecture and the project plan provided by our consulting partners rdquo;

Sure, it started even before the project plan with dead souls from overseas (see http://yakovfain.javadevelopersjournal.com/dead_souls_from_overseas.htm )was carefully baked into it.

Most likely, it started when these nicely dressed salesmen showed up at GM armed (and dangerous) with beautifully prepared powerpoint presentations showing “where you are now rdquo; and “where you want to be in a year, two years, and even five years rdquo;. Yes, they knew all the answers. And here “s the road map that will bring you from point A to point B with the help of Global Leeches Ltd.

The visitors would continue, “If you “d hire American resources for the same job, it would cost you $15B, but we can deliver the same suite of products and services for mere $7B. rdquo;

Sounds like a good deal, and the orgy of the vampires begins.

The Information Week “s article states that GM awarded $7B in 2006, but you “ll never learn such classified information as how much of this amount was spent on the projects that failed.

Another hint that GM “s IT is doomed is the statement about creation of the global teams. The combination of two innocent words global and team gives me goose bumps. I don “t believe in global teams.

I “m one of the partners running a small company, and we “ve learned our lesson and would never hire a global team. We cherry pick individuals, put them through THE SAME tough interviewing process as local candidates would go through. We manage individuals. This model works for us just fine.

During the last (tough) year, majority of our clients were not large corporations, but the small ones, and we found the explanation. Solutions that we offer are based on simple architectures that do not require bringing a bunch of consultants lead by a full time manager. We give our customers an economical solution.

Interestingly enough, when we present our solutions to small companies running on a very limited budget, they are well received by these companies that must count their money. But if we “d present the same solution to a large IT shop, it would not fly. Why? Because individuals and small companies appreciate real costs, track record and simplicity as main artifacts of “real cost of ownership “. Large organizations are more concerned with imaginary artifacts of “savings “, “discounts ” and “proven architecture ” while keeping large outsourcing budget as it ‘s easily justifies their IT portion of “managing “.

People in the enterprise architectural committee will quickly “get the message ” and will look for technical solutions that can be illustrated with some “serious rdquo; architectural diagrams that would help in proving hellip; the need of having a full time architectural committee. But realistically that would inflate the efforts to the extent that would help these individuals in achieving their career objectives pleasing the C-level management at the same time.

The rest of the answers by Mr. Szygenda (GM “s CIO) just confirms that he “s not a leader that GM needs at these trying times. He quotes the statements of the CEO who believes this and that. We know were his believes brought the company. The CIO uses the words could and probably too often.

I see no hope there.

I ‘m finishing writing a book for O ‘Reilly “Enterprise Development with Flex “. It ‘s my 6th one.

Yesterday, I got an email from a person asking if I ‘d like to write a new book on software. Here ‘s what came to my mind. A gynecologist goes home from work. It was a long day. He was passing by a street whore standing on the corner, and she whispered, ” I can show you my pussy for $20 “.

No more technical books…At least for a year… I ‘m exhausted.

On the other hand, I started a series of blogs that I might turn into an e-book about America. I write about when and why I came here, how I see and feel America, what I found unusual or different, e t.c. Kinda, an Immigrant Programmer ‘s Diaries.

For now, I ‘m started it as a series of blogs in Russian language. But if someone will offer to show me a pussy, oops…publish and print that book in English (or Russian), I ‘ll definitely consider.

If you can read in Russian, the first five blogs are here.

It “s a huge tragedy, and my heart goes to the survivors of 228 passengers who left Rio, but never arrived to Paris.

The black boxes landed somewhere 3000 meters deep in the ocean and their batteries supporting emitting signals will die in 30 days.

The chances are very slim that the boxes from the crashed Air France plane will be found, and the world will never learn if this was a one time failure or some serious design issue of that particular aircraft model.

I wonder why air industry is still using such a bogus method as black boxes?

I would do it differently ndash; in addition to recording in black boxes in planes, 100% of the pilots ” conversations should transmitted as an audio stream to a server located on the ground at the closest to the vehicle control center ‘s. This way in case of the aircraft crash all the data about the accident would be available immediately. No need to spend millions trying to locate and get a hold of the black boxes. Huge cost savings…

Technically, implementing such a solution is not too difficult. A number of the aircrafts (at least in the USA) already offer the internet connection on board even to the passengers. Identifying a closest to the vehicle server of a particular network is also a no brainer. Streaming audio is a trivial software task too.

I ‘m sure, some airline must be doing this already.

The most difficult part is to bring all the world carriers to the same table, agree on the infrastructure, and develop the software and the new “black boxes rdquo;. A simple commodity computer like a netbook placed in a sturdy case can perform the duties of such transmitter. A central server would automatically aggregate the fragments of the received audio and deliver the complete file to the authorities of the airline the plane belongs to.

Why the world doesn “t do it yet? It “s the 21st century. Talking about rich Internet applications and cloud computing hellip;

I “d be happy to get involved in such a project myself. Guys, let “s do it hellip;Anyone?

This is great news. The most valuable new feature for enterprise developers are data-centric code generator and network monitor. Flash I ‘m glad that Adobe picks up the best ideas from third-party libraries and components and implements them in Flash Builder. It ‘s a win-win situation for the Flex community.

Flash Catalyst will become the main prototyping tool for all Flex UI designers. Need to analyze the generated code to form an opinion about its effect on the productivity of Flex developers.

Overall, I ‘m pleased with these releases. My writeup about them is here: http://flex.sys-con.com/node/982740.

Yesterday, my colleague and I received notifications from MAX 2009 (the main Adobe annual conference) organizers that started with words “We regret to inform you hellip;we were forced to make difficult decisions, which topics would be of most interest to our attendees rdquo;.

The following three out of five submitted proposals were rejected:

1. Flex Design Patterns that Make Sense

2. Occasionally-Connected applications with AIR and BlazeDS

3. Partitioning Flex Enterprise Applications

At this time, we haven “t received the responses for two more submissions:

1. Starting new Enterprise Flex Project

2. Improving Performance in Flex applications

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

Of course, MAX organizers had to make difficult decisions. Of course, they wanted to ensure that engineers from Adobe could share with the Flex crowd the latest solutions and techniques. I don “t have a quarrel with that. People go MAX to get access to Flex team members. I understand and accept it. These guys deserve to have their show. But I “m not going to submit proposals to MAX anymore. The chances are slim that they will be accepted anyway. Why bother? There are plenty of other technical events where I can present.

Apparently MAX organizers don “t think that people who paid thousands of dollars to attend this interesting event need to spend much time hearing some advanced stuff from practitioners unless the latter purchase some sponsorship package that grants freedom of speech. Expect to see 100-level talks like “How to use Flex Builder debugger rdquo; or “FlexUnit Crash Course rdquo;.

I want to make myself clear ndash; I “m not complaining. Adobe can run their shows the way they want. It was my fault – I made the wrong assumptions expecting to see a selection process similar to JavaOne, the main event for Java developers, where plenty of non-Sun employees get to present based just on the technical merits of their submitted papers.

No biggies. Adobe will put together a nice show, and I ‘ll be glad to watch selected presentations online, when available.

What “s left? It “s elementary, Watson! We “ll keep running our small-scale seminars and symposiums for those who want to learn from our experience and share theirs.

Having said that, here “s the three upcoming events that we “ve scheduled:

1. Second Annual Enterprise Flex Symposium, August 7, New York City: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/355645746 . We haven “t published session descriptions yet, but expect to see most of the rejected by MAX presentations and more. If you “d like to present at this technical no-fluff event, please send me an email at yfain at faratasystems.com

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

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

Besides these events, I “ll make a presentation on occasionally connected AIR applications at AJAXWorld in New York City on June 22 http://ajaxworld.com/event/session/469 , and on design patterns that make sense at CFUnited in Virginia on August 14: http://cfunited.com/2009/schedule.

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