GROOVYMAG May Edition!

I wrote part 2 of “Get Rich Quick with Flex and Grails” for Groovymag. Check it out!

Stumbling towards agility

I’ve been developing software now for several years. Most of those years have been as a consultant among various clients, cultures, architectures, methodologies, and technologies. Now I’m an author, speaker, and currently working for a product company that builds medical management software for the insurance industry.

Through it all I’ve seen one common element among folks that I’ve had the privilege of working with. Nearly every team I’ve worked with desired more agility in what they were doing. Most would agree that the affects of agility for the perceived value or inherent benefit is a good thing. For those that take that challenge on good for you. Some strive to arrive at some form of agility and get there while others well….don’t.

As for me, I’m always stumbling towards agility. It’s never perfect, sometimes ugly, not always easy, but always worth it.

Flex On Java – Note for the readers

We would like to take a minute to personally update you on the progress of our book. Although we are running behind the originally estimated release date, the end product will be a much better learning experience. From the beginning we have been continually refining the book and have taken the great feedback we’ve received to align the book more closely to your thoughts and insights. If you are receiving this letter and were part of the reviews, THANK YOU! Much of the feedback received, all helpful, really matched with how we (the authors) were feeling and helped us to really home in on what we felt would be important to include. Here are just some of the things that can be expected out of the new and improved Flex on Java.

Developer accessibility
When we started the Flex on Java journey we wanted to write a book that would assist Java developers in refactoring Java applications with the richness of Flex. Unfortunately, the sample application wasn’t a good fit for everything we wanted to teach and was absorbing too much of our time trying to make it work properly for the readers. The sample application was an open source product that was not easy to download, build and go. This issue caused us to rethink our approach and we turned to Matt Raible’s AppFuse framework that is aimed at helping developers build applications quickly and efficiently. AppFuse makes deployment and creation of the sample application a breeze and also opens the door to developers who are new to Java. It allowed us to focus more on the topic of integrating Flex with Java while broadening its audience to those who are not Java or Flex gurus.

Hit the ground running (faster pace)
The free chapter available will become an introduction to the book and chapter 1 will now get readers rolling with development on the first page. Chapter 1 will begin with developing the server-side application with the AppFuse framework and then quickly begin integrating Flex in chapter 2.

Deepening focus on Flex integration with Java
The faster tempo and more narrow focus on the topic of Flex and Java integration allows us to quickly go deeper in that topic. We will discuss how to use BlazeDS to connect to the Java server-side including POJO services, Spring services and Spring security in more detail. We will also include working with real-time JMS applications utilizing the Flex and Java APIs.

More focus on scalable frameworks
Good developers move from technology to technology and look for frameworks that allow them to avoid the common problems when designing an application. Frameworks for doing both dependency injection for creating loosely coupled applications and Model-View-Controller (MVC) will be explored in more detail. Frameworks such as Spring ActionScript, Cairngorm, and Pure MVC (and possibly others) will be demonstrated.

House cleaning
There are other topics like building the application with Ant and setting up continuous integration that are important but not part of the main gist of the book, so we moved those topics into the Appendices of the book. There are other housecleaning items that are being performed to make this the best book possible on integrating Flex with Java.

We hope that you will be delighted with the upcoming changes to the book. Please feel free to provide us with any feedback you may have for us. Thanks again!

Sincerely,
BJ Allmon and Jeremy Anderson
Authors of Flex on Java

GROOVYMAG April & May Issues – Get Rich Quick with Flex and Grails

My co-author Jeremy Anderson and I had the recent pleasure of writing for GroovyMAG (http://groovymag.com) and working with Michael Kismal who is a cool dude. It just so happen to make the cover in April where we plug Flex into Java in part 1 of the series. Part 2 will make the application real-time with JMS. This is fun stuff so check it out!!

CODEMASH 2009

CODEMASH 2009 was again another great experience. I want to thank my company Click4Care for letting go for a couple days and Pillar Technology Group for letting me crash in the massive suites they had reserved! I think the pillar squad had more fun pairing with each other in the room then they did at the conference. I have to say it was really fun and they are some real nerds. 

Last year scripting was a big theme. Groovy, Ruby, Grails, and Rails took the conference by storm and this year was a continuation of that but did transition the baton more to functional programming (fp) languages like Scala and Erlang.

Concurrency was a keynote last year and with CPU clock speeds flatlining and more cores being injected concurrency was now the focus of atleast a few sessions this year. Ugh… I have come to a place with concurrency. I have a feeling that the best concurrency is the threaded code that didn’t have to be written at all. Find another solution! It’s just ugly. Just do it when there is no other way out of it.  I noticed in the conference that if you do have to do concurrency you may find yourself picking up a fp language in order to ease the pain.

Lunch with Venkat Subramaniam

During the last day at CODEMASH I had the pleasure of having lunch with Venkat. Venkat has authored such books as “Practices of an Agile Developer” and “Programming Groovy” and is a really fun speaker to listen too. Venkat’s presentations are riddled with personal experiences that he’s learned from.

Venkat seems like a great guy and extremely down to earth. If you have a chance to hire him as a consultant or coach do it!

If you haven’t had a chance to hear him speak look him up. He’s not hard to find. If you are a software developer or a development manager and interested in adopting good practices founded by experience read Practices of an Agile Developer. You will most likely be happy you did.

Introducing Flex on Java

I”m currently writing the book Flex on Java with Jeremy Anderson. Flex on Java is being published by Manning and is available now through the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) and is estimated to be available on bookshelves by May 2009.

Flex on Java is a very exciting topic but Flex on the JVM is even better. Languages such as Groovy and JRuby can also take advantage of Flex and costs much less in development, configuration, and maintainability. This is why the book Flex on Java also covers integrating Flex with Groovy & Grails.

Chapter 1 is freely available to download and provides the details of what you will find in the book by topic.