In case you missed it here is a link to the article discussing the Strategy Design Pattern that was recently featured on the O’Reilly, InsideRIA website. Writing the article was a really wonderful experience and I’m extremely excited to have another in the works now. More on that later. Here is a snip of the article, full link follows.

“The goal of this article is to help you gain a better understanding of the Strategy design pattern. The Strategy pattern is used to separate the areas of an application that differ from the areas of an application that remain the same. This design pattern sits on top of several fundamental OOP principals. For example the Strategy pattern uses the concept of programming to an interface rather than an implementation. Strategy also favors composition over inheritance. The reason you would use the Strategy pattern is to abstract an algorithm from a class and create a new class based on the algorithm. Using polymorphism the algorithms can be changed at runtime by the compositing class.”

Exploring the Strategy Design Pattern
November 3, 2008
http://www.insideria.com/2008/11/exploring-the-strategy-design.html

This was a great article to write and it solidified a lot of knowledge about OOP and Design Patterns. I may write another one on the Factory Method. Leave a comment if you have any interest.

In other news I’ll also have another Flex Best Practices article being published on the Adobe website soon.

I’ve also been researching Livecycle and BlazeDS a lot recently. I managed to get both set up and working on my laptop. There are a number of similarities however the default Livecycle setup runs JBoss and the default setup of Blaze runs Tomcat. So some system tweaks were needed here and there. In addition I also had an existing installation of Oracle that really hosed things up. The Oracle installer added some items to my laptops PATH variable which resulted in quite a bit of debugging. Next I installed MySQL. That was cool and I learned a lot. I’ve done the MySQL installation before however it’s been a while (4 years’ish). The next thing I did was locate a sample database from the web to play around with. I found a pretty large sample employees database on the web and installed it. Then I started trying to remember the various SQL statements needed to retrieve data, JOINs etc. While working on all of this I also found a way to expose my Blaze server to the open web, despite the dynamically assigned IP address from my ISP. That was really cool, but super slow. I was accessing the Blaze samples from my other computer across the web however it was too slow to deal with (not sure what the problem was there, more research is needed probably my upstream.) So the next steps are going to be to write some cool SQL statements to pull data from my sample database, then setup my Blaze application instance/context, write my Java classes (integrating my SQL), set up my remoting configurations and then finally I want to build a “dashboard” and pump the data into some Flex charts. I’m really busy with client work and articles right now so who knows when I’ll be able to finish but the whole experience was fun and I learned A TON.

I’ve also been working on a cool client Flex project and sneaking in time here and there for some music. Well gotta run for now, until next time… Happy Flexing!!