In case you’re wondering why I am thinking about developers so much today (like its a change from the norm) its because I am here at JavaPolis in Antwerp, flight and breakfast and lunch courtesy of Adobe, which is not currently a client).

I am in a keynote by James Ward, an Adobe Flex evangelist.

Its very interesting that the session is about Flex working with Spring and Hibernate. That’s right folks – Flex to open source object relational frameworks. The key point is that Adobe wants to augment Java skills. Spring and Hibernate have reduced JEE back end complexity, while Adobe is looking at the front end complexity issues. Its all about lesscode.

Did I remember to say- Java is not dead. Neither are JEE skills. Its just EJB that’s suffering, whatever Burton says.

“We’re not trying to replace Java. We love Java. I use it all the time for back ends.” 

its about moving to a consistent front end model.”

Christophe Rooms, from Adobe, who has a day job but is a Adobe developer evangelist the rest of the time, said: “Is Flash the client SDK that Java always wanted to be?”

“See the UI as another thing just like a database. I ask Java devs- is your database Java, they say no. So why does your client have to be Java”

Lets D0rk 0ut: liveblogging

So a destination ID – CRM data mapped by Hibernate. Just take a Hibernate object, specify a primary key, and entity. That’s a  data service.

dataservice.fill as a tag, and that’s it. it populates the array.

the datagrid listens to the data field, and updates if their are any back end changes.

what about synchronisation? keep clients in synch as clients happen. have a save button – a number of changes, a commit in a transaction.  just tag a commit.

Flex includes a conflict resolution API – ask the user, which version should we use? [Question here – i want to know more about how this scales… that’s a good question. its one thing to do a demo with clients updating a data set- but what about concurrency and I/O”

How to do with Spring? Specify a spring bean. or work with EJB or POJO.

Joachim Maes, a senior java consultant at Xplore

From a company doing proof of concepts with Java and Flex, called Xemex, Flex setups with IDE

Xemex

collects readings from electricity meters, every 15 minutes. rather than like today – every year. how do you visualise that? You don?t *have* to use flex data services-which are rather surface-oriented. So configure as a plain old Java object..

Spring config = Flex extension point; no need to write the integration.

Flex Development Set-up for IDEs (the Flex limitation section!)

We ran workshops internally. the first question is can i used my IDE, cruise control, ANT, can i do unit tests? Those are the first questions.  Its not that easy to set up. we tried using Flex project, Java project, or WTP project with FDS plugin… (which enables JEE, automated build etc).

integrate with Test Runner. maybe i shouldn’t say unit testing, but its very good when learning a new language

“Flex has some limitations. Wants to deploy to an app server. But developers want it in their workspace.”

flex compiler also runs on Linux. useful for continuous integration approaches.

DragonFlex

Is a create/read/update/delete CRUD app.

ColdFusion – skills are relevant.

ColdFusion versus Java – similar amount of code (but Spring).

The killer quote from Joachim, who does not work for Adobe was:

“Its amazing how similar and natural this all feels to a Java developer. there is also a large community there all ready, open source libraries and so on.”

Conclusions:

Adobe is missing a trick in its marketing to developers. It isn’t talking explicitly about Agile development, when many of its functions are very relevant there. Unit testing, continuous integration is a key message – and if this Adobe markets to this, of course of course it will begin to fill in the holes in its environment that Joachim mentioned… Agility is something that pretty much every enterprise we talk to is currently thinking about. Pace of change is killing these folks.

James Ward is Web 1.0/20th Century Man

James is a tad web 1.0 – though. he is offering an iPod nano… to someone that emails a copy of their blog about Flex. What about tags, which would be today’s method? An email? That is so last century. How embarrassing. Ever hear of Technorati?

 

Anyway its time to finish so we can drink some Stella Artois… the other good reason to come to Belgium…

 

Technorati Tags: Flex – Agile – Adobe – JavaPolis – Spring – Hibernate – Java – JEE – Xplore