Sean Moore - Flex Developer, AIR Developer, ActionScript Programmer » General Development Notes

seantheflexguyTV – episode 02: Flash and the City conference, AIR 2.0, Flex 3 with Java book review

seantheflexguy — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:14:01 +0000

Here’s the second episode of seantheflexguyTV! In this episode I talk about the upcoming Flash and the City conference in NYC. I also cover some of the new features and capabilities of AIR 2.0 and do a quick review of the Flex 3 with Java book. This episode should be a little more organized and focused. I put together some show notes this time, which you can download here. In addition I’ve collected up some links for you to check out that relate to the topics covered in the show. Thanks a ton for your suggestions last week and thanks for tuning in. The next episode will focus on Flex “Gotchas.” I’m looking to you, the viewer, to send any gotchas that you’ve encountered in your Flex development adventures. Please send them to: info@seantheflexguy.com I’m looking for problems with solutions if you have them. Nothing crazy just any weird issues you’ve found solutions for that others might benefit from. Thanks again for checking out the show, I appreciate your time and feedback. I have to send a HUGE shout out to Jens at Flash Magazine for the Vimeo Plus account for the shows going forward. Flash Magazine is now an official sponsor of seantheflexguyTV. Stay tuned for some exciting stuff moving forward. Well, until next time, take it easy…

seantheflexguyTV – episode 02: Flash and the City, AIR 2.0, Flex 3 with Java book review from seantheflexguy on Vimeo.

Flash and the City Conference Blog

http://blog.flashandthecity.com/

Flash and the City Speakers

http://blog.flashandthecity.com/speakers/

Elad Elrom’s AIR 2.0 Cookbook recipes (thanks again dude!)

http://elromdesign.com/blog/2010/02/01/10-recipes-on-adc-cookbooks-covering-air-20-new-apis/

AIR 2.0 info on the Adobe Labs site

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/

Exploring the new file capabilities in Adobe AIR 2

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/flex/articles/exploring_file_capabilities.html

StorageVolume class info

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/filesystem/StorageVolume.html

StorageVolumeInfo class info

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/filesystem/StorageVolumeInfo.html

StorageVolumeChangeEvent class info

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/events/StorageVolumeChangeEvent.html

Interacting with Native Processes in AIR 2.0

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/flex/quickstart/interacting_with_native_process.html

AIR 2.0 New Features Overview

http://www.infoq.com/articles/air-20-new-features

AIR 2.0 FAQ on Adobe Labs

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR_2:Developer_FAQ

New Features in AIR 2.0 on Adobe Labs

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR_2:Release_Notes#New_Features_in_AIR_2__beta_2

AIR 2 Enhancements Complete Overview

http://www.insideria.com/2009/10/air-2-enhancements-complete-ov.html

Using the Microphone capabilities in Adobe AIR 2 beta

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/flex/articles/using_mic_api.html

TouchEvent class info

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/events/TouchEvent.html

TouchscreenType

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/system/TouchscreenType.html

MultitouchInputMode

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/ui/MultitouchInputMode.html

Multitouch

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/ui/Multitouch.html

TransformGestureEvent

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/beta/reference/actionscript/3/flash/events/TransformGestureEvent.html

seantheflexguyTV – episode 01: RobotLegs, Flex Unit 4, FlexPMD, FDT, RIATest and more!

seantheflexguy — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:05:07 +0000

Here’s the first episode of seantheflexguyTV! I’ll talk about several new Flex related tools and some software development books. I’d like to thank Jesse Warden for the inspiration and the nudge to get seantheflexguyTV started. More specifically in this episode I talk a little about: RobotLegs, Parsley, FlexPMD, RIATest, Hello Flex 4, Clean Code, 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know, Flex Unit 4 and FDT. Please let me know if you love/hate the series and if you have any feedback. You can reach me by email at: info@seantheflexguy.com. Thanks for checking it out. If you have a tool, book, magazine or anything else that you’d like reviewed or any news stories please get in touch!!

Review: Trillix AS3 Decompiler and SWF to FLA Convertor

seantheflexguy — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 14:02:06 +0000

Flash decompilation is a touchy subject to many people. There is the unethical aspect that quickly comes into focus when talking about decompilation. There is a time where having a solid tool to handle decompilation is critical. If you’ve ever lost an FLA or had one become corrupt then you know this need well. Another legitimate use of decompilation is learning how a particular effect or a piece of functionality was created.

So as a disclaimer I’ll have to say that I do not advocate stealing another businesses or developers work. Businesses spend considerable amounts of money to conceptualize and build breathtaking applications. Developers spend countless hours coding, debugging and testing and many times they become attached to the codebase. It’s unethical at best to steal from another business or developer. Just don’t do it, ok?

In the world of software development and specifically web development decompilation is however unavoidable. If you develop an application you should always be prepared for the chance that it could be reverse engineered. It may not be ethical but it is always a possibility.

Now with all of that out of the way lets take a look at an awesome application that can be used to decompile and reassemble SWF files. Trillix is very, very impressive. I’ve used a few different decompilation utilities over the years when FLAs corrupted on me or were misplaced. Trillix stands up to the competition. Some of the features and functionality are, well, amazing.

The code decompilation is pretty good. You can customize the syntax coloring which is cool. The real power of Trillix is its ability to convert an SWF back into an FLA. I only converted a few simple SWFs back to FLA but the results were stunning. The FLAs that get reassembled appear to be pretty usable and intact. This functionality would be a life saver if you lost an FLA or had one corrupt on you. Another great use for Trillix would be if a client didn’t have the FLA and came to you with change requests for their application. Trillix also had sophisticated funtionality to extract resources from SWFs including graphics, audio and MovieClips. Trillix can also convert SWFs to EXE projectors. Another powerful feature is the ability to edit the internal assets of an SWF and then save out an updated version of the SWF.

Other than the ability to decompile AS3 source there may not be a ton of functionality for Flex developers. I’d highly recommend Trillix to Flash developers though. The price of 80$ is definitely worth it to have a tool this powerful around. If you were ever in the need for a FLA recovery tool you’d be extremely relieved to own a copy of Trillix.

A Flex / Flash guy learning more about Java

seantheflexguy — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:01:49 +0000

Understanding more about Java is great. A good amount of knowledge can be shared between Flex/ActionScript 3.0 and Java. I’ve worked with Java in the past, compiled some applications, read the tutorials and some books, helped build a Java based LMS and also worked with Adobe on writing a simple Java socket server, but I wanted more of a thorough understanding of the language. The University of California at San Diego offers a great series of programming and software development courses. These classes are really affordable so I decided to take a Java II course. It’s been seven weeks and so far the experience has been awesome. The end goal is to become more familiar with the core Java language. My hope is that this will enable me to have greater confidence when working on Flex and BlazeDS projects. (A really cool stack I’ve been playing with recently is Flex/Cairngorm, the new Spring/BlazeDS integration and Hibernate/MySQL. Eventually I want to get this running on Glassfish. Something else I’ve been looking into.)

Some items we’ve covered in the Java class so far are: SDK installation and command line compilation, data types, control flow, variables/operators, numbers, arrays, objects and classes, static classes and methods, method overloading, object construction, constructor overloading, OOP basics, packages, commenting, generating JavaDoc, inheritance, abstract classes, polymorphism, sub/superclasses, reflection, inner classes, graphics programming, event handling, Swing and Collections including Maps, Lists, Sets and the Comparator interface. We’re compiling all of our homework using the command line. It’s pretty cool. The class also demands a pretty rigorous reading schedule. The three-pronged-learning-approach is working well for me: lectures, reading, coding (homework and labs.) The ins and outs of the language are really sinking in.

A few immediate benefits to learning more about Java are: Flex and BlazeDS / LCDS integration, strengthen fundamental OOP understanding and comprehension and also gain knowledge of OOP concepts not available in Flex/AS3. Learning Java also provides the opportunity to get exposure to Swing (Flex’s distant relative). Also, since the Flex compiler and other aspects of the Flex SDK are written in Java this opens up the door to greater understanding of the Flex SDK and even bug contributions. Java makes extensive use of design patterns and there is a plethora of existing Java code to look at, use and learn from. (Cairngorm was born from J2EE design patterns.)

There are several differences that I noticed in Java. Some items available in Java and not in AS3: static classes, abstract classes, private constructors, constructor overloading, method overloading and Collections. Working with Arrays is a LOT different, working with numbers is different, working with Strings is different and String comparison is different. There are no Hashmaps and no hashcodes in ActionScript. No equals() method. Another difference is that you have to implement your own design patterns more often in Java. Not a bad thing, and good to know how to do, but Flex takes care of a lot of things behind the scenes: events, data binding etc. I noticed that when coding Java the developer is expected to implement interfaces more often than in Flex/AS3. This is pretty cool; it involves more work but provides more power.

It’s been a cool experience and I wanted to share some of these thoughts and observations. I think more developers come into the Flex world from Java vs. the other way around. For some reason Java sort of reminds me of AS2… I may try to post some Java source code soon if time permits…

Flex Best Practices Presentations

seantheflexguy — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:10:00 +0000

The San Diego Flash Users Group invited me to give a presentation on Flex Best Practices last night. Thanks to everyone who took the time to join the meeting. Thanks to Kyle and Chris for inviting me to present. Also thanks a lot to everyone who provided all the great feedback and questions. Dan made the journey down from the mountains to join us as well. Several attendees inquired about getting a copy of the slideshow. I think the articles that I wrote for Adobe are actually much better and cover even more material than the Powerpoint presentation. Here are the links to the articles:

Flex best practices – Part 1: Setting up your Flex project article

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/best_practices_pt1.html

Flex best practices – Part 2: Development practices

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/best_practices_pt2.html

If you would still like the Powerpoint preso email me and I’ll send it along.

There was an example application that I wanted to share as well. I’ll post it on this blog in the very near future. It utilizes many of the practices and standards covered in my presentation and the articles. I’d like to provide a little info or blog post at least along with the example…soon….

I’ll be giving this same presentation on Flex Best Practices in March at the OC Flex Users Group. Thanks to ASFusion for the invite!!

Thanks again to everyone who made it out last night. The audience was really great and had great questions and a great discussion. I appreciate everyone’s time and feedback. Thanks to Dolores for all of the help getting ready for the preso too!!

Exploring the Strategy Design Pattern article on InsideRIA

seantheflexguy — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 18:39:10 +0000

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!!

Flex 4 Gumbo Link Roundup: From getting started to skinning

seantheflexguy — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:46:13 +0000

Mock Flex 4 Gumbo logo

Flex 4 is certain to mold the future of RIA development. Building on the existing Halo theme the Flex Team has started to further refine the component model and architecture for Flex. Flex 4 has a strong focus on design. One primary goal is to allow designers and developers to collaborate in innovative and unseen ways bending the RIA paradigm and pushing the expressive envelope even further.

Here is a useful list of links for finding information about Flex 4 – Gumbo. From getting started to the new skinning features this list of links will help introduce you to Flex 4.

“Gumbo plan” video – Matt Chotin
http://flexorg.wip3.adobe.com/gumbo/gumboplan.htm

Flex Bug Database – Filtered to show 4 Gumbo Bugs

http://snurl.com/39jlk

Gumbo Themes
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo+Themes

An Introduction to the Gumbo Component Architecture
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo+Component+Architecture

Compiling Your First Flex 4 Application
http://blog.smartlogicsolutions.com/2008/07/15/compiling-your-first-flex-4-application/

Compiling Flex 4 (Gumbo)
http://sherifabdou.com/2008/07/compiling-flex-4-gumbo/

Adobe® Flex™ Gumbo Language Reference
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/gumbo/langref/

Gumbo Downloads from Adobe
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4

Flex 4.0 Gumbo ~ Developer Designer workflow, just awesome
http://bkflex.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/flex-40-gumbo-developer-designer-workflow-just-awesome/

Using the beta Gumbo SDK in Flex Builder 3
http://blog.flexexamples.com/2008/08/02/using-the-beta-gumbo-sdk-in-flex-builder-3/

Downloading and installing Flex SDK builds from opensource.adobe.com
http://blog.flexexamples.com/2008/08/01/downloading-and-installing-flex-sdk-builds-from-opensourceadobecom/

Jumping Into Skinning with Flex 4
http://scalenine.com/blog/2008/07/17/jumping-into-skinning-with-flex-4/

Gumbo (Flex 4) Skin with Transitions
http://scalenine.com/blog/2008/07/20/gumbo-flex-4-skin-with-transitions/

Flex 4 (Gumbo) VSlider, HSlider, Panel Skinny Example
http://sherifabdou.com/2008/07/flex-4-gumbo-vslider-hslider-panel-skinny-example/

Flex 4(Gumbo) using the includeIn Property and States
http://sherifabdou.com/2008/07/flex-4gumbo-using-the-includein-property-and-states/

FXG kicks ass!
http://www.richapps.de/?p=156

ILOG Elixir Gauges using Flex 4 (aka Gumbo) FXG
http://blogs.ilog.com/elixir/2008/07/18/ilog-elixir-gauges-using-flex-4-aka-gumbo-fxg/

If you are Trying to Compile Gumbo (Flex 4) and getting a Verify Error
http://sherifabdou.com/2008/07/if-you-are-trying-to-compile-gumbo-flex-4-and-getting-a-verify-error/

Flex-mojos compiling Flex 4 Gumbo?
http://blog.flex-mojos.info/2008/07/16/flex-mojos-compiling-flex-4-gumbo/

A couple other related, useful links:

Cygwin
http://www.cygwin.com/

J2SE 5.0_13
http://java.sun.com/products/archive/j2se/5.0_13/index.html

Ant 1.7.0
http://archive.apache.org/dist/ant/binaries/apache-ant-1.7.0-bin.zip

mm.cfg
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/download/attachments/2392481/mm.cfg?version=1

FlexSDK.cfg
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/download/attachments/2392481/FlexSDK.cfg?version=1

Flex 3 Cheatsheet, MXML controls – Page 1 Draft

sean — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:43:41 +0000

Here is a draft version for the Flex 3 Cheatsheets. A number of MXML controls are detailed on this draft. For the first few Flex 3 Cheatsheets I am thinking about following this format for the rest of the commonly used MXML controls and containers. The properties, events and styles are taken directly from the Flex 3 Language reference for now. This is a change from the previous cheatsheets. Does this information help, or is the old format better? Constructive feedback appreciated.

Flex 3 Cheatsheet, page 1 DRAFT:
http://actionscriptcheatsheet.com/pdf/Flex3ControlsCheatsheet_p1.pdf

42 tech items for Flex Developers to research, study and watch in 2008

sean — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:14:20 +0000

2007 was an AWESOME year for Flex and AIR. 2008 should continue this trend. Here are several different technologies and other items I plan on monitoring going into 2008. Some of these are bleeding edge, others are fundamentals which we’ve been studying for years.

“Iâ€™m sure that Flex skills will be one of the hottest skills to have in 2008.” – Yakov Fain

ActionScript 3.0
Essential ActionScript 3.0
Personally I plan on digging into the nitty-gritty details of the language. This includes refining knowledge of Errors, Events, Exceptions, Interfaces, Bitmap API, Display API and Namespaces to name a few. I’ll be reading Essential ActionScript 3.0 to do so.

Adobe AIR
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
The first full release of AIR should be coming in 2008. With the rapid growth and massive interest already I cannot even speculate what 08 will bring for this exciting, young technology.

Adobe Astro
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Astro
“The next major release of Flash Player, codename “Astro,” was first previewed at Adobe MAX 2007. The preview highlighted a few of the new capabilities the Flash Player team is working on for Astro: advanced text layout, simple 3D effects, and custom filters, blend modes and effects.”

Adobe BlazeDS
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/blazeds/
http://livedocs.adobe.com/labs/blazeds/html/index.html
“BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to AdobeÂ® Flexâ„¢ and Adobe AIRâ„¢ applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.”

API’s
http://programmableweb.com/apis/directory/1?sort=date
I always keep an eye on this area of Programmable Web for new ideas for applications and mashups.

ASDoc
Using ASDoc
“ASDoc is a command-line tool that you can use to create API language reference documentation as HTML pages from the classes in your Flex application. The Adobe Flex team uses the ASDoc tool to generate the Adobe Flex 2 Language Reference.”

Brain-computer interface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interfaces
http://www.techrivet.com/2007/07/23/NeuroSkyMovingBeyondConceptBCI.aspx
“brain-computer interface (BCI), sometimes called a direct neural interface or a brain-machine interface, is a direct communication pathway between a human or animal brain (or brain cell culture) and an external device.” The WII in Flash was cool, let’s see one of these plugged into the Flash Platform!!!

Cairngorm
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Cairngorm
http://www.cairngormdocs.org/
“The Cairngorm Microarchitecture is a lightweight yet prescriptive framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development.”

Cloud Computing
http://tnerd.com/2007/10/14/cloud-computing-the-next-big-thing-is-cloud/
Cloud_computing_wp_final_8Oct.pdf
“is a computing paradigm shift where computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual server to a â€œcloudâ€ of computers. Users of the cloud only need to be concerned with the computing service being asked for, as the underlying details of how itâ€™s achieved are hidden”

Design Patterns
http://www.javacamp.org/designPattern/
http://www.exciton.cs.rice.edu/JAvaResources/DesignPatterns/default.htm
ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques
“In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations”

E4X
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/training_e4x.html
http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-357.htm
E4X: A new approach to XML processing
http://www.w3schools.com/e4x/default.asp
“E4X offers a natural, fluent set of language constructs for manipulating XML. In contrast to traditional XML-parsing APIs, XML with E4X performs like a native data type of the language. E4X streamlines the development of applications that manipulate XML by drastically reducing the amount of code needed.”

EcmaScript 4.0
http://www.ecmascript.org/
http://www.ecmascript.org/es4/spec/evolutionary-programming-tutorial.pdf
Microsoft trying to derail ECMAScript 4?
“ECMA-262 Edition 4 is the next-generation version of ECMAScript being developed currently by the ECMA TG1 working group.” This space is heating up, keep a watch on this one I have a feeling this is going to shape the future of the web in major ways.

Flash Media Server
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashmediaserver
“an enterprise-grade data and media server from Adobe Systems Inc. This server works together with the Flash Player runtime to create media driven, multiuser RIAâ€™s.”

Flex 3 & Flex 4
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/
Keep an eye on Adobe Labs. Flex 3 will be coming out in 2008 and who knows we may even see at least some more talk about or get to provide additional input on the future of Flex.

Flex Custom Components
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/creating_components.html
Flex Component Kit Alpha for Flex 2.0.1
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/creating_as3_components.html
I think creating custom components for Flex is going to increase in demand in 2008.

Flex Performance and Memory Profiling
Performance and Memory Profiling
“Memory profiling lets you look at objects being created, take snapshots and compare them. Performance profiling allows snapshots for looking at cumulative and internal time.”

Flex Persistent Framework Caching
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2007/08/player_update_p.cfm

Flex Refactoring
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/videos/refactoringdemo/

Flex Skinning
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex_skins.html
http://www.scalenine.com/resources.html
“If you want to redesign the appearance of the Flex components more radically, you can do so by creating a new set of skins for the Flex components that completely replace the built-in Halo Aeon theme.”

Hibernate
http://www.hibernate.org/
“Hibernate is a powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service. Hibernate lets you develop persistent classes following object-oriented idiom – including association, inheritance, polymorphism, composition, and collections.”

Hydra / Adobe Image Foundation
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIF_Toolkit
“The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit preview release includes a high-performance graphics programming language that Adobe is developing for image processing, codenamed Hydra, and an application to create, compile and preview Hydra filters and effects.”

Java 7
https://jdk7.dev.java.net/
http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2007/08/09/looking-ahead-to-java-7.html

Java 6
http://www.sun.com/training/catalog/courses/WJB-110A.xml
http://www.sun.com/training/catalog/courses/SL-275-SE6.xml
http://www.sun.com/training/catalog/courses/CX-310-065.xml
Here are a few links with training recommended for Java certification. Might be something to think about for the future.

JavaFX
http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/index.jsp
“The JavaFX product family delivers the ability to create interactive content, applications and services from the desktop to mobile devices to the living room.”

Microformats
http://microformats.org/
“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” Microformats are being used in conjunction with Adobe AIR.

Occasionally Connected Apps
Monitoring network connectivity
One of the draws to using Adobe AIR is the ability to monitor network connectivity. This is one area I want to work with and research a bit more in 2008.

OOP
http://www.friendsofed.com/book.html?isbn=1590598458
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/actionscript/articles/oop_as3.html
“Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm that uses “objects” and their interactions to design applications and computer programs. It is based on several techniques, including encapsulation, modularity, polymorphism, and inheritance. It was not commonly used in mainstream software application development until the early 1990s. Many modern programming languages now support OOP.”

Papervision 2.0
http://blog.papervision3d.org/
http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk
http://blog.zupko.info/?p=76
“Features: Faster! ShadeMaterials, Shaders, ASCollada (animation support), Frustrum Culling, Multiple Viewports, Render to Scene and more. More features expected soon.”

Prisim
http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/
“Unlike Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight, weâ€™re not building a proprietary platform to replace the web. We think the web is a powerful and open platform for this sort of innovation, so our goal is to identify and facilitate the development of enhancements that bring the advantages of desktop apps to the web platform.”

Refactoring
http://www.refactoring.com/
“Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a ‘refactoring’) does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring.”

Spring
http://www.springframework.org/
http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=IntrotoSpring25
“The Spring Framework is probably best known for offering features required to effectively create complex business applications outside of the programming models that historically have been dominant in the industry. Next to that it is also credited for introducing previously unfamiliar functionalities into today’s mainstream development practices, even beyond the Java platform.”

SQLite
http://www.sqlite.org/
http://sqlitebrowser.sourceforge.net/
“SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine.” This is used in google gears and Adobe AIR. Firefox also uses SQLite.

Struts
http://struts.apache.org/
“An open source framework for building Servlet/JSP based web applications based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design paradigm.”

Subversion
http://subversion.tigris.org/
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/
http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.4/svn-book.pdf
“Subversion (SVN) is a version control system initiated in 2000 by CollabNet Inc. It allows users to keep track of changes made to any type of electronic data, typically source code, web pages or design documents.”

Surface Computing
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
“Surface computing is the use of a specialized computer GUI in which traditional GUI elements are replaced by intuitive, everyday objects. Instead of a keyboard and mouse, the user interacts directly with a touch-sensitive screen, replicating the familiar hands-on experience of everyday object manipulation.”

Swing
Java Swing By Marc Loy
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/
“Swing is a widget toolkit for Java. It is part of Sun Microsystems’ Java Foundation Classes (JFC) â€” an API for providing a graphical user interface (GUI) for Java programs. Swing includes GUI widgets such as text boxes, buttons, split-panes, and tables.”

Thermo
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo
“Thermo” is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Technological singularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
“There is no clear definition, but usually the Singularity is meant as a future time when societal, scientific and economic change is so fast we cannot even imagine what will happen from our present perspective, and when humanity will become posthumanity.”

TouchLib
http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/touchlib/
“Touchlib is our library for creating multi-touch interaction surfaces. It handles tracking blobs of infrared light for you and sends your programs multitouch events, such as ‘finger down’, ‘finger moved’, and ‘finger released’. It includes a configuration app and a few demos to get you started. It interaces with most major types of webcams and video capture devices”

UML
http://www.uml.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language
“In the field of software engineering, the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a standardized specification language for object modeling. UML is a general-purpose modeling language that includes a graphical notation used to create an abstract model of a system, referred to as a UML model.”

Unit Testing
http://code.google.com/p/as3flexunitlib/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/unit_testing.html
“Unit testing is a procedure used to validate that individual units of source code are working properly. A unit is the smallest testable part of an application. In procedural programming a unit may be an individual program, function, procedure, etc., while in object-oriented programming, the smallest unit is a method; which may belong to a base/super class, abstract class or derived/child class.”

WebKit
http://webkit.org/
http://webkit.org/blog/
“WebKit is an open source web browser engine.” This is the browser used within Adobe AIR.