Some countries hate America, others want to be like America. I “ll just mention three episodes I “ve been personally involved in during the past two weeks, to tell you why I like living in America. Try to apply these cases to your country, and honestly answer to yourself, if the outcome would be the same. The names of the businesses and the money involved are real.

Case #1. I had to take my car for a scheduled service to the dealership called Ray Catena. Over the past 10 years, I “ve been leasing several cars from them. In the morning, I dropped the car there and had a short conversation with the person who was taking care of the paperwork and the loaner car.

I “ve asked, “How much this service would cost me? rdquo;

He said, “From $325 to $425. The car is pretty new, but you have high mileage, so it depends if we “ll need to replace the brake fluid in the system. rdquo;

When I picked the car in the evening, they “ve charged me $325. Apparently, they did not need to replace the brake fluid. What stopped them from charging me $425? I would not knew if they did or did no flush the brake fluid. They just did not. How much would you pay in the same situation in your country?

Case #2. Last year we switched our TV cable provider to Cablevision. Recently, we found out that the jack in the guest room did not have a signal. We called them, and they said, “We can send you a technician, and it “ll cost you $46 rdquo;. We made an appointment; the cable guy came in and fixed it for free. He said, “I thought, I “d need to do add an extra cable, but the cable was already there. Most likely, the technician who was doing the job last year just forgot to connect it rdquo;. If he “d send give me the $46 bill, I “d pay without saying a word. But he did not do it. How about the same situation in your country?

Case #3. My brother is visiting, and he asked me to help him with purchasing a laptop. We came to the electronic store from a chain called Circuit City, and found a laptop we liked. It was on display for $619. We “ve asked the clerk, “Please check if you have this model in stock rdquo;. He checked on the computer and said, “Sorry we are out of it rdquo;.

“Can you check the other stores in the area? rdquo;

He did, and none of the stores had this model.

“Can we purchase this one that you have on display rdquo;

“Sorry, you can “t rdquo;

Over the years, I “ve learned that one should never take the first “No rdquo; for an answer. I asked for the supervisor, and he saw that we were eager to buy this laptop, agreed to check if it had all required accessories. He found the bag with the battery, CD and the manuals, and said, rdquo;OK, we “ve got everything, and will be able to sell it to you as an open box deal for $549 rdquo;.

We “d be happy to get it even for $619, but he gave us a discount, because this laptop was already “in use rdquo;. How this story would end in your country?

America is not an ideal country, it has lots of crooks and businesses that are trying to get your money for nothing, but in general, the way of doing business here is healthy. Yes, there are stupid clerks that just do not care, and you need to take an extra step to get what you want, but the majority of people are running business honestly. These are some of the reasons why I really like living in America. All these little episodes are things that make the quality of life here a lot better.

Recently, I had a conversation with a fellow colleague, a software developer who was originally from India. I asked him how much money he would “ve earned if he “d return back to India with his current skills and industry experience? He said, “about $5K USD a month “, which is A LOT of money for people living there. But when I asked him if he had any plans to go back to India, he simply said, “No. The quality of life is a lot higher here rdquo;. I know exactly what he means.

There was a great poet and singer in Russia – Vladimir Vysotsky. One of his songs is about his conversation with some Captain. They “d talk and drink, and at the at the end of the conversation, he said, “You know, Captain, you “ll never be promoted to Major rdquo;. I “ve been teaching programming to hundreds of people, and usually after the first couple of hours into the class, I can see if the student will make it or not. There was this guy who really needed a job. After attending one of my motivational talks he became convinced that Adobe Flex is the hot software and it makes sense to get trained and hit the job market early, when you can get a job if you know how to spell Flex. Then he sent me several emails asking what would be his chances of finding a job after attending my class. I never promise easy employment to anyone, especially in the USA . The market can be great, your technical skills are hot, and then you go to job interviews and you keep failing them. Why? What did you say there? Was it a wrong question that you “ve asked? A bad breath? What? You just do not get an offer. So I said, “I have no idea if you “ll be able to find a job after this training rdquo;. Anyway, he “s enrolled into the class. When other people were working on the labs and exercises, he “s chatting online. One day he left two hours early. He seemed like a smart guy, but he was on his own schedule. Needless to say that he did not do even a half of the hands on work. After the class, he sent me a thank you email, adding that now the only thing that “s left is finding a job. And I said to myself, “No Captain, you “ll never become Major! rdquo; Just being smart does not cut it. A guy comes to a rabbi asking him to talk to God so he could win in a lottery – lots of kids, no job, nothing to eat and the wife is pregnant again. The rabbi promised to talk to God. In a month, the man comes back asking, “Rabbi, did you talk to God about me winning the lottery? I still did not win! rdquo; The rabbi said, “Yes, I did, but have you purchase a lottery ticket yet? ” “No Captain, you “ll never become Major! rdquo;

Last weekend our company have conducted a two-day public training on Adobe Flex in Edison, New Jersey. The room was packed and we “ve received a really nice feedback from many attendees. Inspired by a success of this training, we “ve decided to repeat it in several cities across the USA.

This is how it works: we inject a solution of basic Adobe Flex techniques, design patterns, custom components and examples from the real-world projects. The procedure lasts 2×7 hours, the price of this weekend injection is $399 USD, which is cheaper than Botox and effect stays longer. You do not have to take the time off at your current project, and will have a chance to immerse into this hot technology on the go.

We are planning to run one such event a month and these are the first cities on our list are: Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Philly. If you believe that there might be an interest to such event in other cities, we “ll gladly consider your suggestions.

On Saturday, I ran the first day of our public seminar “Weekend with Flex Experts ” in New Jersey, and on Sunday morning I “ve arrived to our private client in Dallas, Texas to run custom Flex training . Ten minutes after I started, the entire building lost the power. I “ve got juice in my vaio laptop for 30 minutes. My students were using MacBook Pros, and they “ve happily announced that their batteries should run for about four hours.

I ‘ve started the training using the paper copy of the courseware. The batteries started dying one after another, and during the next two hours I “ve been running a “hands-on rdquo; training, helping myself by waiving hands and using body language to impersonate development of rich Internet applications with Flex. I felt like a singer who had to sing at a stadium without a mike. When we “ve got the power, I did not need it really. The audience was great and we “ve had a pretty good understanding regarding best practices of software development. Someone has suggested beer a couple of times hellip;

On Monday morning I was back at the client “s site, and ten minutes after, the bulb in the projector died. Nobody was surprised at all. A large second monitor let me finish the job.

Morale of this story: when it rains it pours, so?

In my opinion this is THE biggest announcement that I “ve heard from Adobe after release Flex 2 in the Summer of 2006. This is bigger than open sourcing Flex. This is bigger than AIR. Here “s the news: Adobe is open sourcing AMF protocol and messaging under LGPL V3. Christophe Coenraets, a Senior Flex Evangelist from Adobe told me about this new free product called BlazeDS.

While many people are using Flex for creating cool widgets that can make your Web page prettier, enterprise Flex developers have to deal with such boring things as bringing data to the client. And they want to do this as fast as possible. AMF3 protocol allows your Web application to send the data over the wire at lease ten times faster than a regular HTTP.

Basically, Adobe extracted the libraries that supported AMF protocol from LiveCycle Data Services ES and gave it to us for free. On top of that, BlazeDS introduces a new channel for messaging: DHTTPStreaming that will support messaging on top of HTTP. In this mode the Web browser keeps the connection open. RTMP protocol will not be open-sourced at this time.

Like the news? I know. And here ‘s something for dessert. Adobe is publishing a full specification of the AMF3 protocol, which will allow anyone to implement Flex remoting for any server-side programming language.

Based on my experience, the price tag of LCDS licenses was too hefty for many small and mid-size businesses. They ‘d love to have faster communication with POJO , but purchasing just the communication piece was not available. Now you ‘ll get it for free.

For those who are afraid of jumping into open source waters and want a product that is backed up by a large company, Adobe will maintain LiveCycle Data Services Community Edition, which is BlazeDS certified by Adobe. in the diagram below, LCDS components that won ‘t be included in BlazeDS are shown in gray.

The product will stay in Beta for a couple of months, but since it “s a pretty stable software, the GA release will follow up shortly. Visit http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds for more details.

Now, why this announcement is important for the company I work for:

1. Now we ‘ll have a lot more consulting requests.

2. Our firm will start selling more of our software components, namely ClearBI and Clear Data Builder. We can just say to our customers that other than our licenses, there ‘s nothing else to purchase.

3. We ‘ll have more training requests since Flex will be used by a lot more organizations since BlazeDS will definitely open many enterprise doors to Flex development.

Overall, Adobe made a very smart move, which on the long run will lead to more sales of LCDS too. But for now let ‘s enjoy free BlazeDS.

Thirty years ago. The Soviet Union. On election day people would gather at the voting centers to select Leonid Brezhnev. Who do you vote for – Leonid Breznev or Leonid Brezhnev? You pick! This was one extreme.

When I ‘ve arrived to the USA, I was overwhelmed by the variety of everything. Which cereal, tv, car, sofa, audio to select? There is so many of them…I was lost! Please someone help! This was another extreme.

AJAX advocates often use this argument: “With AJAX you do not need to be locked in with any vendor as opposed to Flex (Adobe) Silverlight (Microsoft) or Java (Sun). Just use freely available JavaScript, CSS, HTML, XMLHttpRequest and you are set. ”

Is it really so? Then, AJAX vendors (contradicting the AJAX advocates) add the following phrase to their brochures: “With our framework you do need to write JavaScript manually “.

Fine. Let me select the framework XYZ (locking myself in with the vendor of XYZ). How many AJAX vendors are there? There is an open AJAX developer ‘s survey. It has only three questions. But please look at the question number 3 that lists your choices. Please select the one you like… if you can. The creator of this survey realizes, that he might have forgotten some other AJAX framework, hence the field Other at the end of this laundry list.

I hate selecting Brezhnev from Brezhnev, but I do not want to see this variety of frameworks either.

It happens again and again… First one guy from India published a number of myJava articles on his Web site without even mentioning my name. I blogged about it and the guy apologized and removed the content from his Web site.

Here ‘s a fresh one, please welcome, Mr. Sridhar Raparthi. Here ‘s my article published under my name here , there and right there . And this is Mr. Rapati ‘s version in his blog called In Search of Soul. I know for sure that this search won ‘t be tha fastest one. This poor soul has forgotten to put my name there…

In his “About Me ” section Sridar introduces himself as follows: “i am basically a bit roaming guy, a bit of anger, a bit of sympathy to humanity…. ”

He just need to add there “and a bit of a thief…well, just a little bit “.

My friend (let ‘s call him Joe) went to Texas on business. He rented a car and had to drive a couple of hundred miles from one city to another. In Texas, driving 200 miles is an non-event – it ‘s like driving 20 miles in New Jersey. Joe was running late, he was speeding and got pulled over by a state trooper for doing 82 on 65. The trooper stayed in the car for a while and then invited Joe to step out of the car and slowly approach the police car, which Joe did. Then, a typical “License, registration and insurance, please. What do you do in Texas?… ” The cop liked Joe and just gave him a written warning – not a ticket.

When Joe arrived to his destination city, he could not find his driver ‘s license, which was not a good thing because on the next day he was supposed to board the plane to go back home. Passports are not required for traveling within the country, but you need a valid ID. Joe decided that the cop must have forgotten to return his license earlier today. Next day he was driving back on the same highway, and noticed a police car not to far from the place of yesterday ‘s incident. He pulled over and ask the cop who was in the car if there is a way to contact yesterday ‘s cop (Joe showed him the paper warning). This cop said that he has a vague idea where that cop might be, took Joe ‘s cell phone and promised to contact him later that day. In about an hour, he called Joe and said that he found that cop in a so-and-so shopping plaza, which was in 30 miles from the place Joe was at the moment. In Texas, driving 30 miles is like driving 3 in New Jersey, remember?

When Joe arrived to that sopping plaza, he found his yesterday cop watching a video tape with with another cop. Apparently, they tape each incident on the road, and he was trying to find the “an episode ” with Joe. Finally he ‘s got and showed Joe on the screen how he ‘s returned his driver license. Even at this point it ‘s clear that the cops did more than they ‘ve were expected to do, but the story continues…

Then the cop said, “Most likely you ‘ve dropped the license on the spot and it ‘s still there in the grass. Do you want to go and check? I have the GPS info of that place recorded on the tape, so we can find that spot easily “. Joe, was amazed and grateful, especially given the fact that they were in 20 miles from that place. They drove to the spot – dusty grass in the middle of nowhere – no licenses laying around. Then the cop goes, “Wait a minute, I made a mistake – as per GPS we are three hundred yards away from the right spot. ” They ‘ve moved three hundred yards down and found Joe ‘s driver ‘s license in the grass!

To me, this is an amazing story. First and foremost, it tells me that people in Texas are better than in the Greater New York area. I can not imagine something like this happening in New Jersey. Not in the wildest dream.

Second, I thought that only in Hollywood movies the police can use the the latest technologies in their day-to-day lives. Apparently I was wrone.

Bravo, Texas police!

The year of 2007 was a good one. The IT job market was stable. The mankind got an iPhone. While there were no any revolutionary changes in the ways software was developed, I believe that this was a year of rich Internet applications and Web 2.0. Youtube became a part of life of millions of people around the world. A large portion of the population visits use myface and facebook daily. What “s next? What language/tool/technique to learn? What “s the next big thing in IT? In my opinion hellip;

1. Java will remain strong in large enterprises, but will it “ll continue losing grounds as a development platform for small businesses. J2EE is way too heavy, and scripting languages and frameworks offer an alternative and productive way of software development when cost of development is more important than performance and scalability. LAMP platform will remain a preferable way to develop applications for small to medium businesses.

2. AJAX popularity may go downhill. Since the first day this acronym was created I “ve been writing that it ‘s not a good choice for developing enterprise applications. But the vast majority of software world was (and still is) marching the AJAX way. This time it “s more of a hope than a prediction that in 2008 people will realize that AJAX should serve the same goal as JavaScript ndash; making your Web pages a little prettier. Expect to see re-branding of some of the AJAX frameworks into RIA or Web 2.0 solutions.

3. Speaking of Web 2.0 hellip; Even though Web 2.0 was not officially defined, I think it “s all about giving more control to the users of the Web sites. The more interactive is a Web site, the higher number people will put in front of the zero ndash; 3.0, 4.0 and so on. Some people say that Web 3.0 is about semantic Web. If you bought a grill on Amazon.com they can guess with a high probability that you might be shopping for rib eye steaks. Let “s show it to you next time you visit the site. It “s all about control. From the user “s side and from the vendor “s site. We “ll see more and more interactive sites next years. While some people are planning to write a next generation sophisticated software, others will come up with a very simple, easy to implement but appealing business idea, and the next 20-year billionaire is born.

4. Flash Player. It will remain the best deployment platform for rich Internet applications. While Microsoft is trying to come up with a competitive delivering platform for RIA, it “s not going to happen in 2008. Silverlight 1.0 is a good start, the next version (1.1) will be even better, but it “ll take time to release a product that can do more than streaming multimedia.

5. Ruby on Rails will take a small share of the market of small non-mission Web applications. Convention over configuration. Speed of development over performance. While Ruby on Rails will not become a framework of choice, it has achieved a very positive result ndash; people started to realize that not every project has to be developed in either Java or .Net. Besides, RoR is a well designed framework that will become a good design sample for the new frameworks of the future.

6. Internet video. This will be booming and I “m not talking about youtube. The Internet Video will start being a part of a number of enterprise applications. This process won “t be fast, and you have an opportunity to be among the early adopters in this sector.

7. Outsourcing will be gaining more and more grounds despite the fact that it “s very expensive and the project failure rate is high. The reason is that the USA almost stopped producing software engineers. It “s just the matter of time for everyone to get used to the fact that business software is made in India just like we all know that all toys (with or without lead) are made in China. But innovation in software will still be happening in America. I guess, there “s something in the air here. Re-read an old but valid article by Paul Graham about why the Silicon Valley can “t be exported.

8. Apple. Next year I “ll finally purchase a MacBook Pro for myself hellip; if my Sony Vaio will die. Even if it won “t die, having a two year old machine is a good excuse for submitting a purchase order to my wife for an approval. Peer pressure, cool design and ability to run Windows (plan B), will force me to ignore the high price.

9. Adobe Flex and AIR. Flex will become the #1 tool for developing enterprise rich Internet application, and I “ll be seeing less that 10% of the raised hands when asking an audience, “Raise your hand if you dor not know what Flex is? rdquo; Adobe AIR “s adoption will be slow though. Or course, the shops that are already sold on Flex will use it, and some AJAX developers will realize that it may become a life saver for their applications, but that “s about it. While being a well designed and very promising technology (Flex, Flash Player, HTML, JavaScript, PDF, SQLLite DBMS, an ability to work in a disconnected mode, and full access to your PC “s resources), it may be perceived as yet another Web browser, which is a tough sell in the enterprises. At least, become an early adopter. I will.

10. Telephony. If 2007 was a year of Skype, we “ll see some interesting development in this area. Skype is a great product, but it requires you to download and install software. In the era of RIA things can be done without it. Watch the Ribbit phone software that will allow you to make calls and receive emails just from your Web browser.

11. IT job market in the USA. While we “ve enjoyed a stable demand in the IT professionals in 2007, it won “t last and next year we “ll see project freezes and even layoffs. The reason is the burst of the real estate bubble. And this will affect not only those simple people who were brainwashed and decided that they could have afforded an American dream. CEOs of the major Wall Street corporation are being fired after drowning their companies by getting into bad mortgage debt. Among other things, the IT budget will be severely cut. And as you know, today “s on Wall Street, tomorrow “s on Main street. Use the training budget of your employer now if it “s not too late. Keep your skills up to date.

12. The hottest IT skills of 2008. When the job market is tight, recruiters immediately increase the list of skill requirements for job opennings. You “ll see job posting that expect you to know a number of programming languages ranging from Cobol to C++. Knowing just one hot tool does not cut it anymore. But if you have limited time and need money, start with investing in learning tools for developing rich Internet applications. A skill set -of a high-paid Web developer at a minimum has to include the following skills:

HTML,CSS, JavaScript, J2EE or.NET, Flex or Silverlight, AJAX, and good communication skills. You do not have to really learn AJAX, but must add AJAX keyword to your resume, otherwise you may not even get a job interview.

13. The next big thing. The in software development will change to wider use of code generators. Forget about heavy frameworks regardless of what programming language you use. In a simple case, use some XML style sheets combined with the metadata that describe your application objects to automatically generate the code for these objects. On the larger scale, the entire application may be described using metadata and the XML, and an appropriate code generator will do the job. So programming will change from writing a tedious code that requires lots of coders to describing the metadata and writing custom code generators.

Happy New Year!