Category: Archive

I ‘m happy to invite you to attend a two-day 360 Flex Bootcamp in New Jersey . If you want to learn Flex in a day (yeah, right) attend my one full day hands on training on Friday, Sep 26. Durin the ferst half of the day I ‘ll explain the basics of Flex, and then we ‘ll build an application that will demo Flex/Java connectivity with BlazeDS and we ‘ll also build an RSS reader to get some data from Yahoo!.

If you are not looking for an intro stuff, attend just the Saturday ‘s presentations – great speakers and rock-solid technical content. The organizers of this event managed to make it dirt cheap – just $75 a day.

Hope to see you there.

Back in January I published an article at Flex Developer ‘s Journal about how Flash programmers who really liked programming in Flash where forced by Adobe to learn Flex. Of course, how this ugly heavy-weight monster duo MXML/ActionScript3 can compare with elegant and attractive timeline/ActionScript2 coding?

But Flash developers have families and need to bread on their tables. They had to learn some Flex to be more marketable.

A couple of days ago, I had a conversation with my older son Yuri who is a young animator. He loves drawing and has a degree in classic animation. Over the dinner, I asked him how are his classmate doing? He replied that only a small group of people from his class are animators. Then he said the following phrase about himself and a group of his classmates who managed to survive in this extremely competitive field, “We sucked it up and learned Flash “.

This made me smile… Of course, how this boring process of adding ActionScript to a timelines can compare with really enjoyable inventing and animating cartoon characters? But Yuri has to pay his bills and has to work not only on the episodes for TV shows, but also on boring Web sites for a companies who sell expensive mattresses or nail polish…

We all sucked it up and learned Life.

I don ‘t use Picasa, Flickr, or any other software where allowing my to create and organize photo albums online. I keep them on my local disk poorly organized but I can get get by.

I prefer keeping my personal photos locally. But some people are happy to share with the entire world how they got married or even had, smoke pot or even have sex. Social engineering networks do similar things but most of this information is offered as a text. Especially teenagers are happy to show off online without thinking that 5 years from now this post of photo can screw up their live. “Mom, Jane Lee will be my roommate in college “. Computer savvy Jersey mom does a couple of clicks and responds, “Over my dead body “. Or you are applying for a job. This dumb looking HR guy makes a couple of clicks and thinks to himself, “Over my dead body “.

FBI and CIA agents should be the most happiest users of these networks! They can browse these networks and see what are you up to. During my short exploration of Twitter, I found out that some people keep posting the info like “I ‘m at such and such address now “. The most advanced users go even further – they post exact X and Y coordinates, i.e. 40.894907,-74.443531 (I use X and Y here because one popular author have announced that the world is flat).

But you are smart. You ‘ll never make these stupid posts online, right? Keep reading.

Now we are moving a little bit further. I urge you to watch this video of a new Picasa 3 feature wich is innocentle called Name Tags. Say you have a bunch of photos of Mary, Yakov, and other friends. You need to organize them. Just upload the grab bag of photos to Picasa, and it ‘ll engage a special program that will automatically analyze the photos and group similar faces so you can quickly add a name tag Mary, Yakov and the like. You ‘ll be able to quickly create a photo album that have only Yakov ‘s picture. Nice.

But now let ‘s watch yet another super-duper more than a year old coolest ever video , which may put this little Picasa feature in perspective. I ‘m not sure if Picasa is trying to use this Photosynth software, but this really revolutionizes the entire computer world. No need to tag a public image. Just run this software and recreate the enire scene. I ‘m sure CIA got a hold this software too.

Oh, by the way, who is this drunk girl on the dorm orgy photo? Let me find out real quick…

Update on Sep 18, 2008. Wall Street Journal has published an article called “CollegeApplicants, Beware: Your facebook is Showing “.

WSJ writes, “A new survey of 500 top colleges found that 10% od admission officers acknowledged looking at social networks sites to evaluate applications…Some admission officers said they had rejected students because of material on their sites “.

Yesterday, we “ve had a meeting at Princeton JUG ndash; Reza Rahman has been giving a sneak preview of JEE 6 . The meeting started with a little surprise ndash; projector in the place we meet has not been working. Man, I have my own projector at home hellip;which is 25 minutes away. No biggies. People were determined to find out what “s going on with JEE 6, especially when we have such a presenter ndash; Reza is the author of the book “EJB 3 in Action rdquo; and a member of the Java EE 6 and EJB 3.1 expert groups. Actually, who needs the projector? A 15 inch monitor was adequate.

Everyone has really enjoyed the presentation. The thing is that during the last several years JEE became a stable and mature but not too exiting environment. People routinely were bashing JEE for not being cool and a number of Java developers defected to Spring trying to get high. But JEE6 looks really interesting to me and other people who attended yesterday “s meeting seemed to like it too. They were asking literally dozens of questions, which does not happen that often.

These are some of the features that I “d like to highlight and briefly commented

1. Pruning ndash; removing of dead wood from the code (JAX-RPC, EJB 2.x Entity beans CMP)

2. Profiles ndash; JEE 6 will offer three profiles (will be packaged in three ways). The Minimal profile is basically a Servlet container. The Intermediate profile adds EJB 3.1, WebBeans , JTA and JPA, and the full profile adds JMS, JCA, and a bunch of JAX “es.

I “d re-packaged the Minimal profile to include JMS and transaction management. Give me a Servlet container, JOTM and MOM, and I “ll turn the world upside down. Lots of enterprise applications can be build just by using such products/APIs.

WebBeans (JSR 299) unifies JSF, JPA and EJB 3. It introduces Conversations (circumcised sessions), dependency injections, and annotation meta-programming.

3. There are some efforts to revitalize JSF(convention over configuration, REST and AJAX support), but I “m a little skeptical about this technology. We live in the era of RIA, and I would remove JSF from the JEE spec. Just concentrate on JavaFX, will you?

4. EJB 3.1 will become simpler (haven “t we heard this already? ). Interesting development here is an introduction of a Singleton Bean as a global repository for your application, cron-style declarative and programmatic timers, Java SE support (think about it ndash; you can create a server container on the fly right in your desktop application), EJB Lite.

5.Java Persistence API gets Bean validation (JSR 303) that will let you validate data at various level. I hope there will be a way to selectively turn this validation on or off.

6.Servlet 3.0 (JSR 3.0) is something that I “m watching closely because of its huge scalability potential. Use of non-blocking I/O and asynchronous processing (suspending and resuming of queries) will dramatically increase the number of supported concurrent users . The open source Jetty already offers Servlet 3.0 implementation, and commercial vendors will implement it too. A servlet turns into an annotated POJO.

7.And finally, JEE 6 will offer Web Service support with the ReEST using JAX-RS API.

In my opinion, it “s a good set and you are welcome to send your suggestions to people in charge of JEE 6 at jsr-316-comments@jcp.org .

So speak up, attend you local Java Users Group, and most importantly, don “t leave home without a projector.

Once upon a time, there was a country called Soviet Union, where Russian was an official language. It had 15 republics, and people in some of these republics spoke broken Russian and, in some situations they ‘ve tried to take advantage of it. For example, in the army or at work, when your commander gives you an assignment that you did not do right, they ‘d pretend that it happened because of the language barriers. Apparently, they did not understand what was expected from them. Me no understanding you. “Moya tvoya ne ponimaj “.Everyone knew that it was BS, but…

Last month set up a group at LinkedIn called “Adobe Flex Experts “. Description of this group reads:

“This group includes experienced enterprise RIA developers specializing in Adobe Flex and AIR. To join this group, you have to have a blog with Flex or AIR technical content. ”

More than a half requests to joins coming from India are from people who don ‘t have blogs. Is this the same game “me no understanding you? ” Shouldn ‘t be the case because most of these people understand English better than me. So why is this happening? I clearly stated that I want to create a community of Flex professionals that are not just geeks, but people that give back to the community by blogging about Flex. It does not mean that they are the best Flex programmers in the world, but I just wanted to create a group of active Flex developers who care about the community too.

A hundred people joined within a month, and I rejected about the same number of requests to join for one simple reason – these people didn ‘t have Flex related blogs. I ‘m wondering is this a cultural thingy to try to get in no matter what?

Today posted an ad that we are looking for an experienced software developer. Included the following statement, “Experience with Eclipse plugin development is a must “. The guy from India sends me a resume that has everything but Eclipse plugin development “.

It irritates me because I just don ‘t have time to read all these resumes. As a matter of fact I stopped reading them. Quick Ctrl-F followed by the skill that is a must following by a click on the button Trash. Takes me 15 sec get rid of this candidate.

Does this strategy works? Does just massive bombarding people with the resumes finally bring the results? Is this the reason why India dominates in the outsourcing market too? Just set the goal and go for it. Every rejection brings you closer to the goal. May be it is the way to go?

Me no understanding you…

I like it – it ‘s simple and minimalistic, has a small memory footprint and is easy on the CPU. Flash player works fine on my Windows XP box. I ‘m sure, Mac and Linux version will be available soon too (this is what Sergey Brin has to say ). You may not like the fact that it spawns a new process (23-24Kb) for each opened tab though (on the other hand, it allows you to drag the tabs out of the browser).

Open a couple of tabs and let ‘s count the lines that are “stolen ” from the page content: 5 on top and a toolbar at the bottom – total 6. Google Chrome takes away only three lines from the content.

I like the fact that there is no Applet support out of the box. The fact that IE supports Java 1.1 applets out of the box is pretty much useless for most of the cases. Chrome ‘s Help clearly states that it requires Java 6 update 10. If I ‘d be running Sun Microsystems, I ‘d invite Google management for a dinner in a very expensive French restaurant. This should be a very happy day for JavaFX folks too – they couldn ‘t even dream of a browser that is forcing people to install the very latest runtime required by JavaFX! Looking forward to seeing a least one example of the JavaFX application that will automatically detect that my PC doesn ‘t have Java 6 Update 10 and will SEAMLESSLY install it in 10-20 seconds.

Here ‘s another interesting twist – I was told that people who are sentenced to use IE because of the corporate policies that don ‘t give you admin rights on your desktop CAN install Chrome. Try it for yourself, but keep quiet.

All these competitive RIA technologies worth nothing if the penetration of the runtime engine is low. Hence having a mechanism of spreading Java runtime for RIA is great for the Java community.

I ‘m sure, we ‘ll see some quirks in the beta version of Chrome, but Google will iron them out. In a year, Chrome will bite off a decent chunk of the Web browser ‘s market, and as any competition, it ‘s great for us, the consumers.

We “ve published more than a dozen of PDFs that were used by our software engineers presenting at various events. You can find them under the section Conferences at http://www.faratasystems.com. These are some of the titles:

Comparing Flex Frameworks, Eclipse Plugins for Developing RIA with Flex, Enterprise Portals with Flex, Developing Flex Applications for LiveCycle ES, Open Source Networking and Data Management for Flex Applications, Enterprise Reporting with Flex, Monitoring Trading Applications with Flex.

Six sessions from the recent Enterprise Flex Symposium in New York City were videotaped, and we “ll start publishing them later this month.

For the next three months I “ll be presenting at the following events: NYC Metro Area Oracle Users Group Meeting on Sep 10, Philly Flex Users Group on Sep 11, will run a full day training Advanced Intro to Flex on Sep 26 in NJ during 360|Flex Bootcamp, will speak at EclipseWorld 2008 on October 29 in Reston, VA, folks from 360Flex promised me a slot at their event during MAX “08, and finally, I “ll talk about facelifting SOA with RIA at SOAWorld West in San Jose, CA on November 19.

360Flex got a little brother now. It “s called 360|Flex Camp. The first camp will take place in a month in New Jersey. I knew this for a while but kept a secret – folks from New Jersey Flex Users Group had to take care of logistics of the event. Now it “s official, see details here. They are planning to add another 6 or 7 speakers.

As a part of this event, I “ll be running a full day hands-on Flex training on Friday. When I asked the organizers if they want it to be advanced or intro class, they simply answered, “It has to be an advanced introduction to Flex rdquo;. Sounds challenging, but I “ll come up with something to turn my students from “Flex, Who? rdquo; to people considering job offers for Flex positions.

Tomorrow, I ‘ll be speaking in New York City at Enterprise Flex symposium. If you can ‘t make it, on Wednesday, I ‘ll be speaking in the evening at New Jersey Flex Users group (see http://www.njflex.com/ for details).

Also, if you are a Java developer involved with Flex project, watch the screencast that I ‘ve recorded this moring on our new coll code generator doe creating ActionScript DTO from their Java peers (see http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=357 ) .

Clear Toolkit 3.0 is a set of components, code generators, and plugins created by software engineers of Farata Systems that we were using internally in multiple Flex enterprise projects. In September of 2008, we “ll release its private beta. This toolkit will be available free of charge.

Clear Toolkit is not an architectural framework. It consists of a set of components that extend Flex frameworks and tools built on top of these components that substantially increase productivity of the enterprise Flex developers. Each of these components can be used independently when needed. Here “s what “s included in Clear Toolkit:

Components library is an swc file that includes a number of enhanced Flex components like Datagrid, ComboBox et al.

Clear Data Builder 3.0 is an Eclipse plugin that allows to generate CRUD applications for BlazeDS or LCDS based on an SQL statement or a Java data value object.

DTO2Fx is a utility that automatically generates proper ActionScript classes based on their Java peers.

Log4Fx is an advanced logger (Eclipse plugin) that is built on top of Flex logging API but automates and make the logging process more flexible and user friendly.

Fx2Ant is a generator of optimized ANT build scripts for your Flex Builder projects.

ClearBI 3.0 is a Web reporter for smaller businesses. It includes an AIR-based report designer and flexible report generator that can be used by IT personnel as well as end users.

The beta version of Clear Toolkit will be demonstrated next week at the Enterprise Flex Symposium in New York City. If you are interested in participating as a tester in private Beta program, please drop me a line at yfain at faratasystems.com