Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of 
One might think that a school district software is an easy case when it comes to performance and scalability. Now think of the end of a marking period when everyone is working with progress reports? From this interview you can learn how Neoload, one of the popular stress testing softw...Oct. 28, 2009 08:30 AM EDT Reads: 397
Today, Adobe announced a major release of LiveCycle® Enterprise Suite 2 (ES2), an SOA architecture for automation of document processing, RIA, and process management. It’s an enterprise platform for SOA that brings together various technologies and tools including LiveCycle Data Servi...
I’d like to offer you a legal way to get more than 80% off the registration price at Adobe MAX that will take place next week in Los Angeles. But you have to move fast!
I try to go easy on frameworks in the classroom, because there could be lots of non-technical reasons for adopting this or that framework. I also know that people who created frameworks are seasoned developers with their vision of how things should be done. No disrespect here. But if t...
In ten days I’ll be sitting at the general session at Adobe MAX 09 in LA. People from Adobe will come up on stage one after another delivering the latest news on the products we all use daily. Here’s my short wish list of the news I’d like to hear. I’m sure people who are using Creati...
Today, Adobe made a very interesting announcement - Adobe Flash Platform Services for Distribution is available to the public. To put it simple, it’s a new way of distributing, promoting, and measuring the usage of your applications on the Web.
I got an email from an enterprise architect considering Adobe Flex as a platform for Web application development in their organization. This email contained a well prepared list of questions/remarks/concerns that many of enterprise Web architects may face. That’s why I decided to pub...
First of all, to add a little more credibility to what I’m about to write, let me just say that I’m running Princeton Java Users Group (JUG) for years and have a pretty good idea of how organization of the meetings and sponsorship work in such gatherings.
Java community is huge, wel...
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 o...
Flex framework includes a pretty useful object that deserves more attention: mx.util.ObjectProxy. You can wrap your object (i.e. Person) into this proxy which will obediently report on all changes that are happening to this instance of a person. If you subclass ObjectProxy, you can ev...
In general, creating of such a simple Yes/no site can save lots of money to the vendors of any other commercial software. Say, your firm runs an e-commerce Web site GreatOnlineStore.com. When your server is down, the phone lines of your customer support get swamped (and you pay for ...
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 dis...
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'll also see a screencast showing how designing each Flex application as a portal can make your RIA more modular and res...
During the last several years our company have been involved in development of many enterprise Flex project. This article is an attempt to summarize challenges and offer solutions that we've developed, tested and successfully implemented for our customers.
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/...
Many Flex and Flash developers were waiting for these news for a year. The public Beta 1 of new Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst and Flex 4 SDK (previously codenamed Gumbo) has been released by Adobe. First, about the name change. What used to be known as Flex Builder is Flash Builder n...
During my recent visit to Ukraine I made a presentation in the local offices of Microsoft on various RIA technologies.After that, I've given a couple of interviews about outsourcing, careers of immigrant programmers in the USA and more.
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 libra...
Tim Bray, a Distinguished Engineer and Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems has been interviewed by InfoQ about the future of the Web. With all my respect to Sun’s engineers, I have to disagree with some of the statements Mr. Bray made.
Today, I was discussing an architecture of a new Flex/Java application with my colleague, and we came up with even lighter architecture than the one I offered, Yakov, the gas station owner. But selling an architecture at a gas station is not the same as selling to Wall Street IT archit...
Why developers want the software to be open sourced? I like quotes by great minds. Here's my favorite quote by Henry Ford: If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right. Some of these chapters of our upcoming O'Reilly book "Enterprise Development with Flex...
When Wall Street Journal writes, they have their reasons. A couple of days ago they wrote that IBM wants to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5B.
To me, this is sad news. People will be laid off and some software will cease to exist.
When you design user interface, it has to be intuitive. If a user does something wrong, the first reaction of rookie developers is, “Stupid Users!” Are they really that stupid? While some users may not be exceptionally bright, if they make mistakes using your software, most likely it...
In early September of '08, I did realized that something was very wrong with the economy. Back then, we’ve deposited a check from one of our customers, a very large enterprise. A week later, we’ve got the message from the bank - the check bounced. That company went belly up.
Joel Spolsky doesn't need my help in defending himself. But since he's my favorite blogger and a person I highly respect, I feel obligated to speak up. Mr. Curt Monash has written an article implying that Joel overestimates his importance while not achieving that much since he was able...
Fifteen years ago, when a New York company needed a programmer, it would publish an ad in the classified section of Sunday edition of New York Times. The paper would charge by column/inch. The ads were short and up to the point. Only big guys like IBM, Microsoft or Oracle could afford ...
One day my son Davey-steamboat showed up in my office with my rated “R” Java tutorial in his hands. He asked me to teach him programming so he could create computer games. At that time I’ve already written a couple of books on Java and taught multiple classes about computer programmi...
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.
The goal of this article is to demo a sample Pet Store application written in JavaFX 1.0. I work for a company called Farata Systems. Laura is our office manager, and she doesn’t know Java. Everyone else does. We work in the enterprise RIA space using Adobe Flex as a main development ...
Management of IT organizations keeps covering the real situation with IT outsourcing. They punish employees for not keeping offshore teams busy.
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 
Today at Adobe MAX Japan, Adobe announced that Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player 10, key components of the Adobe Flash Platform, exceeded installation numbers in record time. 
I'll write my first JavaFX article for Java Developer's Journal in February. BTW, have you seen a new look of JDJ and Flex Developer's Journal? Expect some more very interesting announcements from sys-con that may turn you into a published author. Just keep an eye on the word Ulitzer...
On December 4, JavaFX 1.0 has arrived to this world with lots of "It's a Boy" balloons. The family of RIA development tools gets bigger. Java developers should definitely start experimenting with this new kid on the block.
