Latest News from Clear Toolkit Magazine

First notes from 360Flex conference

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST

I’ve arrived to San Jose,CA late on Sunday. By coincidence, there were three other speakers on the same plane from New York: Shashank Tiwari, Elad Elrom, and Jeff Tapper. A short taxi ride to Marriott and one of the conference organizers, Tom Ortega, gives us a warm welcome in the lobby, “Hello guys! Please don’t do it again. Don’t get on the same plane next time – I can’t afford to lose four speakers”.

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

The morning after.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another day, another framework.

Search Engines still can't index Flash sites with dynamic content

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:18:00 EST

There are two types of Web applications: those that care about their discoverability and those that don’t.
If you are developing a Web application in Flash or Flex for, say, financial advisers (FA) of a brokerage house or salesmen of an insurance company, discoverability is not a concern because FA’s or salesmen of your firm will be told, “Go to so-and-so URL and use so-and-so application”. We can happily say that both FA’s and salesmen have discover their RIA.

If you are developing a consumer-oriented RIA , you want random people to discover their pizzeria, department store, medical office or a car dealership. Why a doctor needs a Web site? Mainly to be discovered by people from the neihborhood if someone will google for a family physician. You can say that some doctors also use Web site to post some useful articles or medical form for their existing customers. True. But still, the main reason for investing into development of a Web site is to increase visibility.

Recently, I wrote a blog about iPhone and Flash , and half of this blog was about excellent Google indexing of the plain HTML information about services of our company.
Today, I’ve read an article by Armando Roggio titled “Best practices for Search-Optimized Flash Development” . This article was supposed to give you a feeling that Google really knows how to peek inside your swf file. The author states, “Need proof? Run this search on Google right now, filetype:swf + “comic books.””

Sure enough, if you’ll do it, the search will return several .swf files that have the words “comic books” hardcoded inside. But most of the RIA bring the content dynamically and rightly so. A well designed RIA arrives to the client with the code that makes the screen pretty. The information about the upcoming sale of your local Ford dealer or recall of millions Toyota cars is not hardcoded into the Web site, but is dynamically downloaded from the server. This creates a nice separation of responsibilities – people who create the content of the site don’t have to modify the Web site every time they want to announce a weekend sale at Ford dealerships.

Will Google index and find dynamically loaded content? I don’t think so.

Mr. Roggio quotes in his article executives of Adobe and Google stating how they collaborate and work hard on improving the situation. I’m sure they do, but so far I don’t see the results.

That article also states the following:
“In fact on June 18, 2009, Google announced that it could load external Flash resources, including text, HTML, XML, additional SWFs, and more. This feature means that you can create a Flash application that draws its content from a structured and external XML document.” And a little later the author states, “As of this past summer, Google can and does retrieve this external files.”

I love Google and use it a hundred times a day, but this announcement (if it really was made by Google) is simply not true, and I can easily prove it to you.

Once again, I’ll direct you to the Flash based Web site of our company . Now I’ll reveal some insider’s information. Our Web site is written in ActionScript 3, but the content of every view you see there comes from external XML files.

For example, if I decide to change the information on the Home view, there is no need to recompile the Web site. I can just use Notepad, TextEdit, Vi, or any other available plain text editor to modify the content of the home.xml file that is being downloded as soon as the compiled SWF file arrives to the Web browser.
Let’s an experiment. The Home view of our Web site starts with the following long statement:

“Do you want your RIA application to be done right the first time? We've built lots of great RIA applications for our clients. Our teams of Flex developers are geographically located in the USA and Eastern Europe. “

Now, copy/paste this long text fragment (with or without double quotes) to Google’s search field. Hit Search. Do you see Farata Systems anywhere in the vicinities? I don’t.
This Web site was deployed about three years ago, and this poor little text we’ve been using in this experiments hasn’t been changed for a couple of years either waiting for any search engine to notice and index it.

You may ask, “Did you use deep linking available in Flex to provide unique URL’s for different views of the in your Web site helping search engines to index the content?” No I didn’t. Our Web site was created in ActionScript long time ago to be as light as possible.

But I know a firm with a complex commercial Web site written in Flex that did use deep linking feature, but it didn’t help. They are considering re-developing the Web site in HTML/JavaScript. Unfortunately, this won’t help, unless they will put the entire content of the Web site inside HTML (but this is not possible and stupid). Using AJAX won’t make them happy if they decide to keep the content dynamically loaded.
If you’ve developed a large Web application with deep linking Flex feature and have good results in terms of Web analytics, I’d love to hear from you.

Now the happy end.

I’ll continue recommending Flex and Flash as the platform of choice for developing of the enterprise RIA. Don’t pay attention to those who predict that HTML5 will kill Flash. It won’t happen for another 10 years, and we need to develop and deploy our RIA today. The fact that someone can purchase H.264 patent licensing royalties and stream the video has very little to do with a robust and well written platform for enterprise RIA such as Flash.

But if your cousine Vinnie asks you to develop a Web site for his new Italian restaurant, use Flash very carefully - mainly for embedding interactive widgets here and there.

Two weeks, two flights, two conferences

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:19:00 EST

The first two weeks of March I’ll be vacationing in training rooms – teaching and learning Flex. I used the word vacationing because I love this part of my work the most.

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

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

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

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

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

In open source RTFM means RTFC

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:39:00 EST

When people are screaming, "I won't use the soft unless it's open sourced", they actually mean the following "I won't to use the soft unless is free and readily supported by authors". People just forget that open source means that the source code is open and they are more than welcome TO READ, IMPROVE, and CONTRIBUTE BACK to the community. Those, who make the most noise don't give a shit about the community. They care only about themselves.

If they run into an issue, they shout "Give me the f'ing author! Let him fix his junk!"

People are nuts. They don't appreciate someone's time. Didn't you want the free and open source software? F'ing take it! It's open. Check it out from the version control system, change it to your liking and rebuild it. If you want to be nice to the community, become a contributor and submit it back to the code repository. Some licenses don't even ask you to submit your changes back. The MIT license reads the following;

"Get the code I've been writing during the last year spending endless nights stealing time from my kids, spouse and mistresses. Do whatever you want with it, but please, please, please don't remove my name form the code comments stating that I'm kinda original author. Would you be so kind and leave my name there? Promise? Cool, man! Just use it, I'll keep writing more code for you cause I love doing it."

Professional programmers know that when a piece of software doesn't work, and you tried but couldn't figure out what's wrong with it, you go to a colleague, he gives you a warm hug and simply says, "RTFM", which stands for Read The F'ing Manual! This usually helps. It's time to use another acronym: RTFC - Read The F'ing Code!

Just read the blog "I guess donating code is not enough anymore". When I run into people like Keith, I'm getting a little pissed off. Just a little bit.

A year ago, our company has open sourced Clear Toolkit is a set of components and code generators that make enterprise Flex/Java developers a lot more productive. We wrote and published decent documentation, but recently I had a similar correspondence with one frustrated user who didn't take time to read the manual. When I answered RTFM, he responded angrily, "I thought I've read somewhere that your product comes with one month of free tech support".

Are you serious? RTFC!

I can tell you more, giving away free and open source is dangerous because some idiots can spoil your reputation by badmouthing you online. They'll happily do it, if you didn't spend enough time helping them learning your soft, or if they will actually open the code and will find some inefficient fragments written by you at 3AM just to make that damn thing work!

If you don't like my open source software, be f'ing nice and do me a favor - stop using it, but do it quietly, please! I apologize for the hours you spent trying to use my software. I can write you an email with all apologies you want, but please have some respect for me taking time trying to make your life a bit easier. Didn't work this time. Don't want to RTFC? It's fine with me, but please stay cool.

I hate giving software away for free, because people are f'king nuts!

Apple and Emotional Discussions Around Adobe Flash Player

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 23:00:00 EST

The recent announcement of iPad has ignited yet another wave of emotional discussions around the role of Flash Player in the evolution of mankind. People easily take sides and everyone seems to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Actually the word ‘’people” is too vague in this context, because vast majority of the population has no idea what Flash Player is, and they don’t have to know! As long as they go to youtube and it plays videos people are happy and casually say, “Youtube is a great site!” On the same note, I have no idea how my car operates. Back in my school days, I’ve learned that some stuff burns inside the engine producing another powerful stuff that make the wheels spin. Do I need to know more? Absolutely not. I lease cars and change them every three years. Once a year I visit those 10-min oil change shops, and people open up the hood and do something to my car, which supposedly helps it run longer.

Built4Flash Launched by Farata Systems

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 22:30:00 EST

There are about 250,000 developers working with Flex and AIR. If you add an army of ActionScript developers, this number will grow substantially. Where do you go if you have a technical issue while developing RIA? As of today, there no one place to ask questions and get answers. A respected forum flexcoders uses the outdated and hard to follow Yahoo! groups. Some people try to find answers visiting blogs they trust. Some developers post their questions on Twitter. About a year ago Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood released a well designed and easy to follow knowledge exchange stackoverflow.com, where people earn reputation by suggesting the right solutions to people’s problems. Flex/Flash/Air developers started to post their questions there among the plethora of questions on other technologies and programming languages.

Several Upcoming Flex Events

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:32:00 EST

At this point I’m working on a couple of new presentations for a bunch of upcoming conferences and seminars and that will take place in Flex community world wide.While in the past, I was trying to create cool presentations, now I wantbe even cooler and... deliver a booring one.

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

A boring presentation on Flex libraries and modules

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

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

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

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

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

Podcast: an interview to the RIARevolution

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 23:15:00 EDT

The online publication RIARevolution.com covers everything related to development of rich Internet applications has published an interview with me as a part of the audio podcast Speak Rich. You can download it as an mp3 file or just listen to it at the following Web page: http://bit.ly/2kwOzT

In this interview we are talking about recent Adobe MAX 2009, using Flash for developing application for iPhone, upcoming Flex 4 framework, open source Clear Toolkit framework, the new book on Enterprise development with Flex and more.

The other episodes of Speak Rich podcast are featuring the following well known software engineers:

Chet Haase, a member of the Adobe Flex SDK team
Stuart Stern, creator of a testing framework Flex Monkey
John Resig, creator of the famous JavaScript library and toolkit — jQuery

You can subscribe to this podcast at http://riarevolution.com/category/speak-rich/

Adobe's Serious Move Towards Model-Driven Development

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EDT

When a couple of months back I told a fellow Flex developer that I’ll be speaking at CFUnited, conference he shrugged, “Why ColdFusion?” Little did he know that CFUnited is branded as a ColdFusion, Flex and AIR conference. And this was true – there were lots of quality presentations on Flex and AIR here...

A Singleton that Flex Developers must know about

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:38:00 EDT

Don’t create new singletons – just use what you already have.

Each real-world software developer knows at least one design pattern – Singleton. Flex has some specifics in implementing Singletons due to lack of private constructors in ActionScript, but the goal of this little writeup is not to show you how to implement Singleton, but rather to discourage you from doing this because each Flex application already has a singleton – just use it.

I’ve recorded an eight-minute video that will shows how you can use the Application object as your one and only singleton when needed. See if you can answer the question that I asked at the end of the video.

This is one of many tricks and techniques that consultants from Farata Systems use while working on enterprise Flex projects, and we’ll continue to share them with you in the form of such mini demos as well as in one of our public seminars like the one on August 7 in New York City or on September 24-25 in London, UK.

Develop each Flex application as a portal

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 20:17:00 EDT

In this brief article I’d like to talk about one of the most important aspects of RIA in general and written in Flex in particular – the initial download process. You application is considered fast for one of two reasons:
1. Well, it is fast
2. It’s perceived to be fast

Today I’ll cover one of the approaches that we at Farata Systems successfully use in literally every enterprise project - designing any Flex application as a portal. There is one exception: Hello World type applications that don’t have any custom styling. Such simple applications can live in a single swf.

Any serious application is technically a portal that consists of a small and light shell application that appears very fast on the user’s machines and downloads (in a smart way) the RSLs that will be needed for the modules lazy loaded modules.

Needless to say that you must always deploy Flex Framework libraries as signed RSLs, which will allow shaving off a substantial amount of downloadable bytes required by your RIA. Unless you have a virgin computer that never seen Flex app, these RSLs will be stored on the user’s disk in Flash Player’s cache (don’t confuse it with the Web browser’s cache).

Now consider an application that has one light-weight main SWF and 10 modules, seven of which include charts. In other words, they rely on datavisualization.swc. During the application startup the SystemManager reads the list of RSL’s from the SWF and loads them with the help of the class of RSLListLoader.

Without going through the advantages of using the RSLs in general, I’d like to mention the fact that Adobe’s class RSLListLoader simply performs loading of all RSLs listed in the generated SystemManager for each module. This means that if the datavisualization.swc was linked in three modules, SystemManager will download it three times (this is the case when this swc was not signed and cached).

We’ve modified the RSLListLoader a little bit so it’ll avoid downloading duplicate RSLs.

One more suggestion for working with modularized applications that use BlazeDS/LCDS – do not create separate services-config.xml files for each of the module. To avoid conflicts, let them reuse one and only services-config.xml listed with the main SWF of your application. This will also allow you to properly allocate work between developers in your team – each of them can have a small test harness application and test his/her modules without the need for waiting when the other modules are ready.

In the following 7-minute screencast I’ll show you the application that has been built in such a way.

People who will attend our Enterprise Flex symposium in New York City on August 7 and Advanced Flex training in London on September will get a chance to get familiar with these techniques in greater details.

Hope to see you there.

Adobe AIR Is Cool and Not So Cool

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 11:30:00 EDT

It includes an ActionScript component OfflineDataCollection that allows you to program local/remote data synchronization. Open source Clear Toolkit framework is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit/ The source code of the OfflineDataCollection is here: http://tinyurl.com/p23do5 A demo recording of the sample occasionally-connected AIR application is here: http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=394. To see the demo in person, come to my talk at AJAX World in New York City in June.

Clear Toolkit 4: The Road Map

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Here’s the roadmap for Clear Toolkit 4 for the year of 2009: 1. Offer data syncrhonization solution for AIR/BlaseDS applications - March 2009 2. Enhance Flex UI component to support PDF generation on the client - April 2009 3. Release documentation on classes from Clear component library (clear.swc) - May 2009. 4. Offer a solution for Flex-based portals - May 2009 5. Open source most of the components of Clear Toolkit - August 2009

Yakov Fain Launches Clear Toolkit Magazine on Ulitzer

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Yakov Fain, one of the top 3 Ulitzer bloggers, launched a new magazine on Ulitzer as a one stop shop for all Flex/AIR/Java developers who decided to use open source Clear Toolkit framework for developing enterprise rich Internet applications.

Introducing Enhanced Flex components from Clear Toolkit

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:38:00 EST

The goal of this article is to give you a brief overview of some of the objects from clear.swc, which is a part of the open source Clear Toolkit framework available at https://sourceforge.net/projects/cleartoolkit.Component library clear.swc includes

Introducing Enhanced Flex Components from Clear Toolkit Framework

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:53:00 EST

The goal of this article is to give you a brief overview of some of the objects from clear.swc, which is a part of the open source Clear Toolkit Flex framework available at Sourceforge.

Clear Toolkit Framework for Adobe Flex Goes Open Source

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:15:00 EST

Clear Toolkit is a framework for developing enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. It includes Eclipse plugins, enhanced Flex components and solutions for automatic data synchronization for AIR/BlazeDS applications. Now it's been open sourced under the MIT license.

Our Flex framework Clear Toolkit goes open source

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:50:00 EST

Our company, Farata Systems, started the process of outsourcing of our Clear Toolkit framework for developing enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. The source code is located in the Sourceforge CVS repository

Pet Store with JavaFX 1.0. Part 1.

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 06:23:00 EST

I work for a company called Farata Systems. The name of our office manager is Laura. She doesn’t know Java. Everyone else does. We work in the enterprise RIA space using Adobe Flex as a main development tool for creating all these nice sc

Data Synchronization with AIR and BlazeDS

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:20:00 EST

One of the main selling points of Adobe AIR is its ability to support occasionally connected applications. See a demo application that implements data synchronization using Adobe AIR, BlazeDS and Clear Toolkit

Creating PDF Documents from Flex Applications

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:00:00 EST

There are three ways of creating PDF documents from Adobe Flex applications: by using the forms/LiveCycle designer, by treating PDF printing as one of the features of your Flex application, and by using Snapshots available in LCDS, which uses bitmaps to represent Flash content. This article shows how to treat PDF printing as a feature of your application.

Friends from Farata at MAX

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:05:12 EST

My friends from Farata Systems, Victor and Yakov, were at MAX. Yakov spoke on Flex Frameworks at 360 | MAX, was part of a panel discussion on the subject and also preseted a BOF on the subject. Unfortunately, I missed his BOF, because I was busy running my own the same time. It was fun [...]

Our Clear Toolkit goes private Beta in September

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 06:41:00 EDT

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 bet

LiveCycle ES 8.2 is a solid platform for business process management

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:33:00 EDT

I'd like to share with you my experience of working with LiveCycle ES 8.2. This strong player in the BPM space version has been released in July of 2008.

Our Mercedes Benz project went live and looks cool!

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:11:00 EDT

Our Mercedes Benz project went live and looks cool!

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 11:11:00 EDT

I’m happy to spread the news – mbusa.com is live! It looks gorgeous, and I’m very proud to be a part of the team that was working on this project (Farata Systems was leading this project on the Flex side). This is Flex 3

MuleSource Nominated for SYS-CON's "SOA World Magazine Readers' Choice Awards"

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:30:00 EDT

Mule is an open source Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Designed to support high-performance, multi-protocol transactions between heterogeneous systems and services, Mule provides the basis for service oriented architecture (SOA). With a standards-based, zero intrusion approach to existing infrastructure and a simplified development model, Mule adapts to your environment and prevents vendor lock-in. The open source model allows organizations to achieve rapid ROI, and open access to source code enables developers to customize Mule to readily meet their needs.

5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo in London Will Be the Most Significant Virtualization Event to Date

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:25:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events (www.sys-con.com) announced today the 5th International Virtualization Conference & Expo will take place January 26-27, 2009, in London, England.

Facelift Your SOA with Rich Internet Applications

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 14:45:00 EDT

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and enhancing the user experience of consumers of the services becomes an important part in designing and implementing SOA. But if you decide to develop rich clients, you'll be facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET or experiment with such newcomers as AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX. While the Internet brings a lot of noise where 'it's cool' is the most popular definition, this presentation is an overview of what's out there on the enterprise RIA market. We'll talk about the pros and cons of using various techniques and technologies for the development of the front end for complex SOA distributed systems.

Flex Best Practices: DTO is the Horseshoe of your Flex Application

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 05:30:00 EST

If I could pass just one Flex advice that would be: Use Data Transfer Objects. Use custom Data Transfer Objects to pass data between server and Flash tiers of your Flex application. Do not use XML. Yes, I know that XML cool. Do not use raw objects.

Rich Internet Applications - State of the Union

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:15:00 EST

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and many enterprise development managers are facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .NET technologies or less known (as yet) yet AJAX, Flex, OpenLaszlo...

Picking the Right Technology for Enterprise Rich Internet Applications

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:00:00 EST

We are entering an era of Rich Internet Applications (RIA), and many enterprise development managers are facing the dilemma - which way to go - remain with tried and true Java or .Net or experiment with such newcomers as AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, or JavaFX. While Internet brings a lot of noise where 'it's cool' is the most popular definition, this presentation is an overview of what's out there on the enterprise RIA market. We'll talk about pros and cons of using various techniques and technologies for development of the front end for complex distributed systems.

Boost Productivity of Your Flex-Java Project with Log4Fx Component

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:30:00 EST

It's hard to overestimate the importance of having a good logging facility when you develop distributed applications. Did the client's request reached the server-side component? What did the server send back? Add to this inability of using debuggers while processing GUI events like focus change, and you may need to spend hours if not days trying to spot some sophisticated errors. That's why a commercial-grade logger is a must if you work with an application that is spread over the network and is written in different languages such as Adobe Flex and Java.

A Complete Application with RPC Communications...

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:00:00 EDT

For security reasons (similar to the Java sandbox concept), Flash clients can only access the domains they come from, unless other servers declare, explicitly or implicitly, trust to SWF files downloaded from our domain by a corresponding record in a crossdomain.xml file. But our portfolio SWF wasn't loaded from finance.yahoo.com, and we aren't allowed to install crossdomain.xml on the Yahoo! servers. We'll use another technique called Flex proxy.

Turning Your Adobe Flex/Java Application Into a RAD Project

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:30:00 EDT

While using Adobe Flex for development of the front end portion of your J2EE applications quickly becomes a reality, many enterprise managers are still waiting for development of Flex ecosystem that would include a pool of professional developers as well as third-party components making Flex-related projects more productive.

Co-Authors of Bestselling RIA Book to Teach "Adobe Flex & Java" Public Workshop

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 08:15:00 EDT

The authors of the bestselling book 'RIA with Adobe Flex and Java' will teach a one of a kind workshop that is aimed at Java developers with no or limited experience in developing enterprise-grade J2EE application with Adobe Flex front end.

SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 East Charter Sponsors Announced

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 19:45:00 EDT

More than 120 distinguished faculty members will teach at the conference, including: Danny Allan (WatchFire), Michael Baum (Splunk), Kadeer Beg (Prolifics), Jason Bloomberg (ZapThink), Toufic Boubez (Layer 7 Technologies), Arjé Cahn (Hippo), Dave Chappell (Oracle), Neelan Choksi (Interface21), Jonathan Clark (Thinstall), Frank Cohen (PushToTest), Dan Corsberg, John Crupi (JackBe), Cornelia Davis (EMC), Kevin Epstein (Scalent), Yakov Fain (Farata Systems), Chris Farrell (ClearApp), Patrick Felstead (Bandit), Pierre Fricke (Red Hat), Kyle Gabhart (Web Age Solutions), Alain Gendre (ILOG), David Greschler (Microsoft), Rajiv Gupta (Securent), Kevin Hakman (TIBCO), Søren Hartvig (Capgemini), Doug Hass (ImageStream), Andrew Hillier (CiRBA), Hideki Hiura (JustSystems), Fred Holahan (Active Endpoints), Wayne Hom (Augmentum), Sajindra Jayasena (Virtusa Corporation), Simon Laws (IBM), Doug Levin (Black Duck Software), Rob Levy (BEA Systems), David Linthicum, Paul Lipton (CA), Bob Lozano (Appistry), Doug MacEachern (Hyperic), Sastry Malladi (eBay), Javier Mariscal (TwoConnect), Frank Martinez (Intershop), Miko Matsumura (webMethods), David Mavashev (Nastel), Joe McKendrick (Evans Data), John Michelsen (iTKO), Laurence Moroney (Mainsoft), Debbie Moynihan (IONA), Diane Mueller (Justsystems), Jeff Nick (EMC), Dale Olds (Novell), Tim Pacileo, Alessandro Perilli (Virtualization Conference & Expo tech chair), Matt Quinn (TIBCO), Sean Rhody (SOA World editor-in-chief and conference tech chair), Marc Rix (SAIC), Peter Roden (OASIS), Jesus Rodriguez (TwoConnect), Ajit Sagar (Infosys), Sekhar Sarukkai (Securent), Bill Soward (Adaptive Planning), Hal Stern (Sun Microsystems), Michael Stiefel (Reliable Software), Roger Strukhoff (SYS-CON.TV), Yuval Tarsi (Serendipity Technologies), Ian Thain (Sybase), Doug Tidwell (IBM), Mark Tsimelzon, Hub Vandervoort (Progress Software), Alex Vasilevsky (Virtual Iron), Jeffrey Walker (Atlassian Software), John Mark Walker (Hyperic), Roland Wartenberg (SAP), Tony Wasserman (Carnegie Mellon), Coach Wei (Nexaweb), Michael Wheaton (Sun Microsystems), David Wood (BT), Raven Zachary (The 451 Group), Jack Zubarev (SWsoft).

ClearBI Web Reporter For Flex and Java Applications Goes to Public Beta

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 17:00:00 EDT

Other than Flash Player, ClearBI does not require any additional software install on the client side. At the time of this writing, ClearBI is the only professional reporting solution on the market of rich Internet applications developed using Adobe Flex and Java. ClearBI is available in two versions: ClearBI Plugin and ClearBI End-User.

SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 East Charter Sponsors Announced

Thu, 17 May 2007 21:26:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events (www.sys-con.com)announced today that the SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 East will takeplace on June 25-27, 2007, in New York City. The event is expected toattract over 1,000 developers, architects, IT managers, softwareprofessionals, and industry participants of every stripe who will beconverging in New York City to attend the most comprehensive meeting onSOA, Web Services, Enterprise Open Source, and Virtualization.

Our Flex Book Is Written!

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 01:45:00 EST

The book 'RIA development with Adobe Flex and Java' is written. Check out the book site. Do you know why we are smiling? Because the writing is over! It took us longer than planned because we had to work for a living, and the time for writing this book was just stolen from our families and our sleep.

Adobe Flex 2: Advanced DataGrid

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 16:00:00 EST

In any GUI tool, one of the most popular components is the one that shows data in a table format like JTable in Java or Datawindow in PowerBuilder. The Adobe Flex 2 version of such a component is called DataGrid. In any UI framework, the robustness of such a component depends on formatting and validating utilities as well as a whole suite of data input controls: CheckBoxes, ComboBoxes, RadioButtons, all sorts of Inputs, Masks, and so on. Using theatrical terminology, the role of the king is played by his entourage. Practically speaking, touching up the DataGrid is touching up a large portion of the Flex framework.

Closures in ActionScript 3

Mon, 04 Dec 2006 18:00:00 EST

Closures is one of the cornerstones of dynamic languages. Closures are unavoidable when you use asynchronous operations or need to process an event on the other object. Almost any non-trivial action in Flex communication with the server or getting an input from user is asynchronous. Using closure automatically gives you the reference to the class instance in which you have your function to the external object processing the event.

Comparing the syntax of Java 5 and ActionScript 3

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 13:30:00 EST

This is a short comparison table of major elements/concepts of these two languages for a quick reference.

Working with Large Applications

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 15:00:00 EST

In this excerpt from our book, Rich Internet Applications, we'll cover how to set up large applications intended for Web or, more broadly speaking, distributed deployment. As an example let's consider an enterprise application that consists of hundreds of screens, reports, forms, and dashboards. Accordingly, about a dozen engineers specializing in GUIs, frameworks, data layers, and business domains are working on this application in parallel.

Business Intelligence in the world of Rich Internet Applications

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:45:00 EDT

We are about to enter a new era, when plain looking Web applications will gradually be replaced with RIA delivered over the Web that can actually land on the PC and work in a disconnected mode as well. How this will affect the evolution of Business Intelligence (BI) applications?

Hey, Wall Street, Flex Your Muscles!

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 12:15:00 EDT

On August 14, I attended the seminar RealWorld Flex in New York City. I was really impressed by the endless number of presentations showing the use of Adobe Flex 2 technology in the real world applications. Real-time processing, vector graphics, collaboration, messaging, multimedia, shopping carts, geo maps, customer support, and more. This was a really interesting event about the technology that will become a hit of 2007.

Teaching Java to Generate Code For Flex 2

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 12:00:00 EDT

It's a known fact that Java and Adobe Flex 2 compliment each other really well. But now accessing database becomes even easier with DAOFlex code generator.

Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 2 and Java

Wed, 10 May 2006 09:45:00 EDT

A typical Java developer knows that when you need to develop a GUI for a Java application, Swing is the tool. Eclipse SWT also has a number of followers, but the majority of people use Java Swing. For the past 10 years, it was a given that Swing development wouldn't be easy; you have to master working with the event-dispatch thread, GridBaglayout, and the like. Recently, the NetBeans team created a nice GUI designer called Matisse, which was also ported to MyEclipse. Prior to Matisse, JBuilder had the best Swing designer, but it was too expensive. Now a good designer comes with NetBeans for free.