In this video, my business partners and I are dancing. This dance is our way to thank our past customers and attract the new ones. This is not to say that we “ll dance to any of your tunes, but rather to ensure that we can choreograph any Flex-related dance on your enterprise floor.
Happy New Year!
Yakov
P.S. This is a 17Mb MPG file, and if you have a slow connection, download the movie first (right-click, Save Link As) for smooth performance.
twitter.com/yfain
American air carriers become more and more creative these days. Their goal remains the same – to squeeze more money out of the passengers any way they can. I know that blanket costs $7, the junk-food-quality meal starts from $5, the first checked in bag is $15, the next one is even more expensive, a bottle of water goes for $2.
Here ‘s a new one – US Airways prepared a nice surprise for me. I booked three seats on a plane for my wife, my son and myself. The email confirming the reservation had just one seat assigned: 5B. This got me wondering, if there is any mistake in this booking. I went online and found out that my wife is the lucky person – she got the middle seat. The isle and widow seats were available right next to 5B. The Web site conveniently offers the seat selection feature.
Any husband having reasonably good relation with his wife would select a seat next to her, and this is exactly what I did. I got the isle seat, which was immediately assigned to me. This was a good news. What I didn ‘t like though, was that it showed the price tag: $10. But, since the USA is a free country, I had an option of not paying. The message in red warned:
You can either buy a Choice Seat, or, if you do not select a Choice Seat, we ‘ll assign you a free seat at the airport. If you change your mind, you can buy a Choice Seat at any time until departure.
I value my freedom, but I don ‘t like the fact that I have to pay $10 for a privilege of sitting next to my wife, and another $10 for having my son around.
Anyway, I decided to purchase a seat next to my wife assuming that our teenage son will be listening to his iPod regardless of where he sits during this short flight. I click on 5C, entered my credit card info, and the entire process of seat assignments was over: 5B, 5C, 15D. The son ‘s seat was picked automatically out of those that were initially marked as unavailable. The optioin to change the seats online was not available anymore. Oh, well, as long as we have peace on the planet and our assets are not managed by the Madoff firm….
twitter.com/yfain
Yesterday, I “ve been listening to the Tech 5 podcast of John C. Dvorak, where he said, “This is the time of the year when all Top 10 are arriving in all these magazines because it “s an easy way to do something and you “re kind of tired of writing and there “s nothing to write about. I think I might write one for the PC Magazine…Most of these things are crap. They are just throwaways. Don “t read them hellip; rdquo;
After these words I decided that this is exactly what I should do. I need to write my Top 10 list.
I “ve been around for a while and have seen a lot of interesting gadgets, products, technologies and fashionable things to do. That “s why I use the word cool really rarely. So here “s my list of things that surprised me and made me use this highly abused word.
10. Shazam. Last week, I was sitting at a noisy restaurant. Somewhere on the background, this annoying elevator music was mixed into this noise. I decided to see if Shazam , a cool application that I installed on my iPhone, will be able to find out for me who ‘s singing. I was amazed – it was listening for a minute, and was able to recognize the song. This is freaking cool! It can recognize 6 million songs. Of course, after recognizing the song, it ‘ll conveniently offer you a link to buy this song at the Apple store, but IMO that is state of the art application.
9. Wall Street Journal. I “ve subscribed to this interesting newspaper and just love it. I may be a bit unusual reader though hellip; Every morning I pick up the fresh paper on my driveway and start with throwing away its section “Money and Investing rdquo;. I “m not interested in Stock market. But the quality of other articles is great and I really enjoy my morning coffee with WSJ.
8. Heatable toilet seat. A couple of months ago I was vacationing in Japan. Each hotel we stayed in had this warm toilet seat with electronic control washing and drying you from behind and from the front. When I came back home, I bought one for my house. The saleswoman in the bath appliances store said, “I got one – it “s heaven! rdquo; She was right.
7. Podcasting. I started recording my own audio podcasts at least once a week. IMO podcasting is better than se hellip; oops blogging. It so much easier to talk than to write, and it “s so much easier to listen than to read hellip;. So far, I “m recording my podcasts in Russian , but next year may start dubbing them in English too. Now an MP3 player, iPod or iPhone combined with a pair of earphones allows you to carry your own world with you regardless of where you are. You always listen to people you like while driving in the car, commuting to work by subway, in the plane, pretty much all the time. You can shield yourself from this annoying world.
Warning. Wearing the earbuds or earphones during sex is dangerous, even more so if your partner wears them too.
6. Bounced check. I “m a partner in a small consulting company. Beside regular consulting work we run training for large corporate clients. Last September we “ve deposited a check from a really large firm, and their check was bounced. The cool thing is that this check was for a small amount. Is there crisis or something? Maybe I shouldn “t throw away that section from WSJ hellip;
5. MacBook Pro.I finally bough MacBook Pro. This is a cool device. You can read about spending my honeymoon with MacBook over here.
4. Vacation in Japan. We love traveling and always knew that Europe was the best destination. This year we found out that Japan is also a great place for vacationing. I “ve blogged about that trip right here . We are planning to go there again soon.
3. iPhone. This is probably the best device I “ve ever bought. This is not just a phone ndash; this is a small great looking and powerful computer. Just love it. Go get it.
2. This is my Mountain. My older son was writing songs for years. They “ve been practicing in basements and once in a while had gigs in small clubs. But finally, they ‘ve released their first real album called “This is my Mountain rdquo; . I like this music, and especially the fact that it turned into a product. You can download a bunch of his songs for free at myspace or even get a CD.
1.Enterprise Software without the BS. This is a title of the e-book I published this year. I was always interested in various aspects of life of a corporate software developer, and this book reflects on how I see it today. The book is available for free download at this Web page .
Happy New Year!
Yakov Fain
In one of the Russian online forums, I ran into a post called “Indian try/catch Java idiom “. Here ‘s what it was about:
“Indian software developers learn from books and copy/paste code from book samples. The Java try/catch example is sometimes shown in a standalone Java application in a method main:
try {
// do some stuff
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace(System.out);
System.exit(-1);
}
Some “great ” authors write these examples and other just copy and paste this code. So if your application server all of a sudden stops working, the chances are that one of the software developer from India just copy/pasted the above code. ”
People from the former USSR often overestimate their coding abilities. But if you apply 80/20 rule, everything falls into its place. In any country with a reasonably established higher education 20% are the best and 80% will always remain poor-to-mediocre software developers.
Since English is a primary language in India ‘s universities and colleges, they have a huge advantage over developers from Russia, Ukraine et al, where many programmers have hard times with English and lag behind Indians in the world IT workforce. Add to this fact that India has huge amount of people in general hence a lot more educated people than Russia, the 80% here and there are not the same.
For sake of this discussion, let ‘s assume there is total of one million of active software developers from India hence 800,000 of them are poor-to-mediocre. At the same time there is only 100,000 visible software developers from Russia hence only 80,000 of them are poor-to-mediocre.
Of course, 80K of bad developers is better than 800K of the same, but if you put things in perspective, I don ‘t think that software developers from Russiua, Ukraine, or Belarus are in general superior that their peers from India.
There are stars and losers everywhere.
Meanwhile, when software developers from Eastern Europe ask me, “What programming language to learn next “, I always give the same answer, “English “.
Disclaimer. I was born in Ukraine, got my Applied Math degree in Russia, and started my software development career in Ukraine.
Yakov Fain
Last week, I was sitting at a noisy restaurant. Somewhere on the background, this annoying elevator music was mixed into this noise. I decided to see if Shazam , a cool application that I installed on my iPhone, will be able to find out for me who ‘s singing. I was amazed – it was listening for a minute, and was able to recognize the song. This is freaking cool! It can recognize 6 million songs. Of course, after recognizing the song, it ‘ll conveniently offer you a link to buy this song at the Apple store, but IMO that is state of the art application.
The second great iPhone application comes from… Microsoft. This is that deep zoom technology (a.k.a. photosynth). Their new SeaDragon application shows how you can zoom into photos taken on a 700 megapixel cameras. What first looks as a myriads of dots, with a couple of multi-touch finger strokes turns into turns into millions of bottles with labels that you can read.
Adobe also works on this deep zoom technology and the first sample Flex component can be found here.
Yakov Fain twitter.com/yfain
Yes, I finally bought my first MacBook Pro a little more than a months ago. All my life I ‘ve been working in MS Windows environment with a small injection of UNIX when needed. My teenage son got the first MacBook in our family last Spring, he was very enthusiastic about his new toy and didn ‘t even want to compare it with anything like Dell or the other Wintel products saying that they suck.
I ‘m neither an Apple Mac OS Nazi. I ‘m not a big fan of hypocrites who make their living spending at least 8 hours in MS Windows just to come home and bash Microsoft.
I bought my MacBook Pro (15 “, 2.54Ghz, 4GB RAM, 7200rpm 320Gb HD) for $2399. It ‘s $200 cheaper than a regular price – my NYU ID entitles me for an educational discount.
I like the design of new MacBook Pro. It feels very solid… How do I put it… Have you ever owned any Mercedes car? Let alone the other qualities of the car, just listen to the sound of the closing door – it ‘s very tight. Japanese cars don ‘t generate this sound. American unions-produced cars are not even admitted to participate in this door sound competition.
OK, if you didn ‘t own Mercedes, do you at least have an iPhone? It feels good in your hands. Who cares if Blackberry or some Nokia products offer more functionality? iPhone looks and feels great so is MacBook.
An old Jewish joke keeps coming to my mind.
“Haim, have you circumcised you newborn boy yet? ”
“I will, but I ‘m not sure why circumcised penis is better? ”
“First of all, it looks gorgeous… ”
The lit keyboard is convenient, the UI of all OS widgets is well done and won ‘t take you long to get used to it. Unless you need to do some heavy duty programming in this environment the switch is pretty easy.
At home, I noticed that my MacBook works a lot faster on the same Wi-Fi router than my two-year old Sony Vaio. A friend of mine explained that MacBook comes with faster N-type wireless card, while my old one had slower G type.
Its monitor built on some new technology, which makes the screen brighter with theoretically lower energy consumption. The sound from internal speakers is excellent for a laptop.
The video quality is great. If you have MacBook, watch the trailer for the Up cartoon http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/up/hd/
Here ‘s another one for you (not sure who ‘s the author):
Macs are for those who don “t want to know why their computer works.
Linux is for those who want to know why their computer works.
DOS is for those who want to know why their computer doesn “t work.
Windows is for those who don “t want to know why their computer doesn “t work.
With MAC, my experience so far is more of a user than programmer. I ‘m using MS Word for Mac, Eclipse, Sound Booth, Skype, Acrobat. MS Word gives scary msg once in a while and dies – it less stable that it Windows brother. I can ‘t use another word processor because I ‘m writing a book for O ‘Reilly and they require use of specific Word templates.
The body of my MacBook does not does not get overheated more than my older Vaio. My colleague suggested to purchase a cooling pad from Belkin, I did, but it ‘s a noisy and inconvenient piece of junk. Costco took it back – no questions asked.
Installed Fusion from VMWare, and starting MS Windows OS is like starting any other app. No need to reboot . It just works great.
Not everything looked rosy during my honeymoon. Here are some cons:
1. Bigger is not always better- the screen is too big for a laptop – I prefer 13 inches. I often use my laptop on the go – riding a bus or sitting in economy seat of the airplane. When the person in front of me presses that button to recline his seat, my fifteen inches immediately move up onto my growing belly. If I had thirteen inches, it ‘d stay on my laps.
2. Not having an option of matte monitor sucks. I understand that Steve Jobs uses his MacBook sitting in a limo with tinted windows, but I ‘m not there yet.
3. The battery life does not impress – 2.5 hours of real work is a mediocre for a newly released product (lowering the screen brightness helps). Don ‘t trust these specs that promise 5 hours. Those results can be repeated if you keep it on with a black screen saver not touching a keyboard.
Overall, I like my MacBook Pro and MAC OS X. But I don ‘t mind working with Windows XP either. Am I bisexual?
Yakov Fain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/yfain
“Have you heard about the crisis? rdquo;
“What crisis? rdquo;
From a recent conversation with my colleague.
Well, of course we “ve heard about the crisis. I “m one of three partners who run a software boutique, and in early September, I did realized that something was very wrong with the economy. Back then, we “ve deposited a check from one of our customers, a very large enterprise. A week later, we “ve got the message from the bank – the check bounced. That company went belly up.
This was an iron clad proof that this is not just a temporary recession. A friend of mine runs another business ndash; he makes crowns and bridges. He makes fake teeth. He often complains about bounced checks from doctor offices, but our case was different ndash; this was not a doctor “s office.
There is a popular definition: “Recession is when your friend got laid off. Depression is when it happened to you rdquo;. To rephrase, “Recession is when small businesses have bounced checks, depression is when it happens with the large ones rdquo;.
There were some other negative signs – postponed software projects. We were about to start several projects with large companies, but they got postponed till better times.
That being said, luckily, we were quite busy all year and already have a queue of interesting projects for the next year. I “d like to tell you a little bit about our way of running business.
We are a small company with three main activities:
1. Consulting in the RIA development that involves Adobe Flex and AIR
2. Conducting training
3. Software development
The first two activities bring the money in. Our software (productivity tools for Flex developers and a Web reporter) is given away for free ndash; this is how we show our potential customers that if we can do this stuff, the chances are very high that we “ll be able to program their order tracking system without too much sweat. This is a proof that we are a low-risk partner.
Let “s talk about the first two activities. How do we sell our services? Guess what, we don “t have sales people. None. Zero. Instead of spending hundreds of thousand of dollars for multiple attempts to hire THE RIGHT salesman, we decided to heavily invest into PR and building our own brand. By the way, we didn “t hire a PR person either. We blog, we write technical articles and books, we speak at large conferences and in front of a small group of people at Flex or Java users group sessions.
Our company doesn “t have overhead. Other than a part time office manager who does the invoicing and sends out post cards during holidays, part time accountant and outsourced payroll company for fifty bucks a month, everyone else is billable almost all the time.
For example, if I “m not busy working for a customer, I spend my time writing the next chapter for the upcoming O “Reilly book. Moneywise, writing a technical book is like working for one dollar per hour. But hey, it “s still billable hours isn “t it?
Writing technical publications is different than writing a Harry Potter book (I wish I could do this). The money you make from selling technical manuscripts is very hard earned dough. But books have very good side effect as long as you are not writing for the “XYZ hellip;for idiots rdquo; series. Our books show that we are well researched in the RIA space, and having one us on the project will secure the management a couple of extra hours of good sleep at night. We are low risk and low maintenance partner.
You may say, “Yakov, just cut the crap and stop bragging, will you? Let “s talk turkey. Can we afford you? rdquo; I “m glad you “ve asked. And let me tell you why we call 2008 “A year of small customers rdquo;.
About six months ago, the office phone rang. The person introduced himself and said that his company needs some help with their Flex project. He wanted to meet.
I asked, “Where are you located? rdquo;
“North Jersey rdquo;
“I “ll be in the area on Friday, and we can meet. Where? rdquo;
The guy gave me directions hellip; to a Starbucks located in a so-and-so shopping plaza. He started the conversation saying that when he dialed our company “s number, he was ready for an answer like “We don “t work with small companies rdquo;. This tiny business owner sounded very appreciative and explained that he hired two Flex consultants located somewhere in Mid-West, who are already developing an application for a large company here in Jersey.
The rest of the story was typical. Flex is very easy to get in, but after a while it became unclear how to do things properly. This meeting at Starbucks turned into a productive partnership. They got from us a very senior Flex developer/architect from Eastern Europe at a very affordable rate. And the good part is that their checks don “t bounce.
We have several other small businesses that use our help and are pretty happy with this partnership. This doesn “t mean that if you have a multi-million dollar project lurking ahead, we can “t handle it. We did it before, and we can do it again. Even though we are keeping a small number of permanent software developers on staff, over the years we “ve established great relations with a large software company in Eastern Europe. We trust them and they trust us.
If we need to quickly ramp up a team with various skills, we can do it within a short lead-time. When the project is over, the team boards the large mother ship again, and we remain agile. Some customers don “t mind having developers overseas, but prefer to have a technical leader and the main point of contact here in the States. No problem, we offer so-called blended rates. You are getting 10-20% of my time and 80-90% of the job is done remotely using daily emails, instant messaging, conversation over Skype and screen sharing. Don “t forget, that we guarantee that all major technical decisions made on your project will be carefully reviewed by us, and the offshore developers are top notch. These arrangements make the whole engagement attractive and affordable.
Running technical training is yet another way to get new customers. We fly all over the world to conduct Flex training for private customers. During the week of training, attendees can clearly see that we “ve learned our stuff not from the books.
This week signed a contract to run certified Flex training class for a client in Texas. How do you like this clause from that contract: “Overall instructor “s scores must exceed 7.5 on a 9 point scale, or equivalent thereof. Evaluations falling below this criterion will result in reduced or zero payment for instruction depending on the shortfall below previously stated guidelines. rdquo;
When I read this statement first, I said to myself, “I “m going to pass on this one rdquo;. I know that I “m a good instructor, and people usually enjoy my classes. But hey, you never know. What if some students just don “t like my personality and will give me lower grades? Bat after a couple of minutes of hesitation, I signed the contract. It “s a challenge, I know I can do it, and I “m up to it.
After re-reading this blog post, I realized that it sounds like a thinly veiled marketing spiel. Sorry, man, gotta do it. Remember, we don “t have sales people, but, somehow, we need to send our message to the respected RIA world, “Just give us a call, and we “ll figure something out rdquo;.
We don “t complain about the business in 2008 and hope that 2009 will be even more prosperous for everyone.
Marry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year!
Yakov Fain
Twitter: http://twitter.com/yfain
Today, we have released a new version of our free Eclipse plugin Clear Data Builder 3.1. This version includes a new feature ndash; generation of a Flex CRUD application based on Java DTO without the need to provide SQL.
During the beta testing of Clear Data Builder (CDB) 3.0 we “ve fixed a couple of bugs. Now it properly works with Oracle stored procedures returning result sets. This version of CDB has no issues with case-sensitive databases (i.e. Sybase).
But the main reason of the version upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1 is a new feature now CDB does not need to know anything about the data persistence layer. It generates the front end for a CRUD application based on the Java Data Transfer Object a.k.a. Value Object.
Pretty often, Flex communicates with POJO that does not directly connects to DBMS using JDBC. The enterprises may use some object-relational frameworks, Web Services or any other means of working with data. Due to multiple requests from our customers , Clear Data Builder 3.1 includes a new feature ndash; CRUD generation without the need to use SQL.
In this mode, CDB requires manually written Java class that implements Assembler design pattern similarly to how it “s done in LCDS data management services. The fill() method of such a class will return a collection of Java Data Transfer Objects (DTO), and the sync() method would receive a collection of ChangeObjects that can be examined by Java code to perform data creation, modification or removal.
In this screencast you “ll see how CDB generates a sample Flex/Java CRUD application based on a provided Java DTO. Description of this process is available over here.
Since this process is decoupled from accessing data storage, Java developers will be responsible to write the code for the data persistence and retrieval.
There are several benefits of using CDB for DTO-based code generation :
1. CDB automatically keeps track of all the changes made by the user and maintains a collection of the ChangeObjects.
2. CDB automatically generates Flex code utilizing remoting using AMF protocol. As a part of this process, it automatically generates ActionScript DTO “s based on their Java peers (this can be done on any code modification)
3. Test applications generated by CDB utilize components from clear.swc component library, which gives you richer components and simplified data form processing.
4. ANT build and deployment scripts are automatically generated for the selected application server.
You can download the User Guide of Clear Data Builder 3.1 at http://www.myflex.org/documentation/CDB3.pdf. Clear Data Builder 3.1 is available for free at http:// http://www.myflex.org .
My twitter: http://twitter.com/yfain
Companies lay off people. It may happen to you, it may happen to me. Some laid off people immediately start blogging badmouthing their former employers. These blogs is the worst you can do to your career.
Today, I ran into a blog of a person whose position was cut as a result of Adobe ‘s recent layoff. I don ‘t know this person, but I was very impressed by the highly professional manner of how his blog was written . No hatred toward Adobe, no dirty laundry, etc.
It ‘s sad news, but just by reading this blog entry, I can clearly see that Jason is a good person and experienced software engineer. People like him don ‘t even need to apply for unemployment benefits. He ‘ll find a new job soon. I ‘m confident.
If you are looking for a software engineer, contact Jason. People like him don ‘t even need to apply for unemployment benefits. He won ‘t last long on the job market. It ‘s easy to find a developer who knows how to write if-statements in the programming language that you use. It ‘s not difficult to find a person who can code a bubble sort algorithm at the speed of sound. But it ‘s extremely difficult to find an experienced and loyal software engineer.
Good luck, Jason!
P.S. Mike Downey is yet another victim. Here ‘s what he wrote in his twitter : “I am no longer with Adobe. It ‘s all for the best. More updates to come later. ” Let ‘s learn to leave gracefully.
My twitter: http://twitter.com/yfain
On December 4, JavaFX arrived to this world with lots of “It “s a Boy rdquo; balloons. The family of RIA development tools gets bigger and as a Java programmer, I wish best of luck to this new kid on the block.
But the party is a little spoiled because the baby is premature and will have to spend some time in barocamera to survive. To make myself clear, I “ll mixin here some definitions from Wikipedia in italic:
Human fertilization is the union of a human egg and sperm, usually occurring in the ampulla of the fallopian tube.
Illustration by Yuri Fain.
In my opinion, this definition is OK for bulls and cows, but in the human world it would be nice if the bearers of sperm and egg loved each other and wanted this baby. In May of 2007, when Sun Microsystems announced JavaFX, I did not see any traces of love there.
This was forced fertilization. Sun, which technically created the first rich Internet application in the form of applets in 1995 did not give enough love to that baby too concentrating its efforts on Java technologies that would help selling Sun “s servers. As a result, Java EE shines as a platform for development and deployment of the server-side enterprise applications.
Java Swing , the client side library, was too difficult to program and most importantly, required large Java runtime that was not too easy to install, had a slow 0-60 acceleration. Java on the client did not have a runtime environment that was feasible for consumer-facing RIA. A trucker from Alabama would not be able to install the proper version of JRE.
In the world of RIA, availability and high penetration of the runtime environment is the most important pre-requisite for any RIA technology or technique. High penetration of Web browsers supporting DHTML plus XMLHttpRequest object is the explanation of the three years of AJAX craze that “s, thanks God, is coming to an end.
About ten years ago, Sun “won rdquo; a lawsuit with Microsoft and made $10B. These bad guys from Redmond wanted to make our Java dirty by quietly introducing their infidel libraries. Sun went into a fight, got the money hellip; and lost the mechanism for spreading Java runtime. The Internet Explorer, that “s being used by about 75% of the users, even today ships with the ten-year old Java 1.1 runtime.
On the other hand, Adobe “s Flash Player is a runtime for Flash and Flex application that “s small, has seamless installation and has a penetration rate of 98%. Flex 2 was announced three years ago after Adobe has acquired Macromedia, and not only offered nice framework for developing UI, but also came with advanced network protocols and easy integration with Java EE on the server.
Microsoft was first to recognize Flex as a new RIA platform leader, and as usually, responded, “Me too. rdquo; And when Microsoft says, “Me too rdquo;, they really mean it. Some very serious dependency injection (I “m talking about long and green) did the trick, and Silverlight 2.0 may start competing with Flex in a year, if the penetration of the Silverlight “s runtime will reach at least 80%.
During JavaOne 2007, Sun realized that they missed the RIA boat and announced JavaFX loud and clear. They were forced to bed, but the sperm met the egg and the process has begun. Marketing people and executives started make some serious noise about JavaFX.
Pregnancy (latin graviditas) is the carrying of one or more offspring, known as a fetus or embryo, inside the uterus of a female.
But just running around screaming, “I “m pregnant, I “m pregnant! rdquo; is not enough for delivering a healthy baby. Pregnant women should have better nutrition, and should be surrounded with love and support. I was following the evolution of JavaFX very closely and I didn “t see this love and support from Sun “s top management. Sun ‘s executives were trumpeting about new and great product, but I ‘d rather see them providing some real support to a small group of talented software engineers that were trying to do the bet pushing the product out the door.
Please read the story of an Chris Oliver, creator of JavaFX. Sun published this strory under the title “Mind-Bendingly Cool Innovation rdquo;. On the surface, it looks like a success story of a boy who didn “t even go to college but became a Senior Stuff Engineer at Sun. But one of the Oliver “s statements tells me that he had lots of obstacles within Sun while working on JavaFX:
“For us, a bunch of tedious work – what I wanted to do but was obstructed for the last several years. Now I won ‘t be obstructed, thanks to the new management. Now the path is open for us to walk down it, but we have to actually walk down it, ” he says. rdquo;
I “m sure, you know that it take a women nine months to deliver a baby. In software, it usually takes a lot longer, and the released version of JavaFX gives me a feeling that it “s premature.
The Web site javafx.com didn “t impress me. The Web site itself was falling down several times during the opening day ndash; it was not tested well enough. This is yet another evidence of insufficient resource allocated to this project. There is no demos of the UI for enterprise-grade applications that I was expecting to see. As a matter of fact, long time ago I “ve been sending emails to people who were involved with development of JavaFX asking for at least a Pet Store demo. It didn “t happen yet.
The start of the available demos is still slow. The ugly messages like “Java Starting rdquo; and “You may not have the right certificate. Do you trust this application? rdquo; will scare that Alabama trucker to death and he “ll run away from this Web site.
On the positive side, JavaFX has pushed Sun to developer Java Kernel, a relatively small JRE that loads faster. The other smart thing is their attention to designer-developer workflow. Sun decided not to re-invent the wheel and create a plugin that should allow designers continue using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator with automatic JavaFX code generator.
Sun made yet another smart decision – decoupling of the JVM from the browser. You should be able to start JavaFX from the browser, but then kill the browser and your applet should stay alive. You should be able to drag the applet from the browser and drop it right onto your desktop (may not work on MAC OS).
Here ‘s another good feature – automatic detection of the client ‘s JVM version. Inclusion of a small JavaScript piece into the HTML wrapper of your applet should check it out and ensure that the user machine has JVM 1.6U10 or above. If not, the JVM should be SEAMLESSY upgraded. I haven ‘t seen this feature in action yet- running available demos on ny MacBook Pro, which has only JVM 1.5, and so far I haven ‘t been forced or offered to do an upgrade.This must be enforced as it ‘s the only way to improve penetration of JVM 1.6U10 (actually, J6U11 is the latest version).
Now Sun has to offer tools for developing JavaFX applications. Sure enough, you can use NetBeans 6.5, but for some reason, majority of Java developers use Eclipse. Quick introduction of Eclipse plugin for JavaFX should be a highest priority item for Sun. Just bite the bullet and do it.
Even though I “m using Adobe Flex for development of the UI portion of enterprise RIA, I don “t fall in love with programming languages, and would be gladly using JavaFX too when it “s ready for production. It may happen in 2010. But Sun has either to put the money where its mouth is or open source JavaFX to allow Java enthusiasts make this language competitive in the RIA world.
My twitter: http://twitter.com/yfain
yakovfain.com 