Javapolis News ❙ 14 December 2007 ❙ Nr 5 ❙ Published by Minoc Business Press 54 www.nonillion.com Parleys Want to become a NONILLIONAIRE ? mail us at : [email protected] Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex and JavaFX “There’s a well thought out com- an online environment using Adobe AIR. “Even when you ponent model for Flex”, he said. are offl ine, you still can update data. When the connec- “And there’s a thriving market tion comes back on, the system synchronizes automati- for components out there, both cally.” Open Source and commercial. So there are literally hundreds JavaPolis founder Stephan Janssen was next to explain of components available to how he decided to have Parleys.com rewritten using Flex. use in Flex.” And no, Flex isn’t Parleys.com offers a massive amount of Java talks – from there for fun and games only. JavaPolis, JavaOne and other Java events from all over “There are already a great the world – combining video images with the actual pres- number of business applica- entation slides of the speakers. Janssen programmed the tions running today, all built application for fun at fi rst, but with over 10 TB of streamed with Flex.” Eckel backed up video in just under a year, it’s clear Parleys.com sort of his statement with an ex- started to lead its own life. “The decision to write a new ample of an interface for an version was made six months ago”, he said. “It was still intranet sales application. too early to use JavaFX. And Silverlight? No thanks.” “Some people think Flex Flex allowed him to leverage the Java code of the earlier isn’t the right choice to version of Parleys.com and to resolve the Web 2.0 and make for business applica- AJAX issues he had en- countered while programming tions, because the render- the fi rst version. “One ing of Flex supposedly is slow”, he continued. “This is thing is still missing”, not true. JavaFX doesn’t do too bad, but Flex is faster.” Of he explained after Yesterday morning’s keynotes were all about Rich course, the rendering speed “also depends on the power an in-depth demo of Internet Applications, as Adobe Flex, Java ME and of the machine it’s running on”, he admitted. Parleys.com’sParleys.com’s new JavaFX were highlighted. JavaPolis founder Stephan features. “So far,far, Janssen took the opportunity to offi cially launch the Performance benefi ts Google doesn’t new version of Parleys.com. As applications go back and forth between the client index Flex appli- and the server all the time, Eckel explained how the Flex cations.” First up was Bruce Eckel. The author of ‘Thinking in C++’ AMF3 protocol is handling that challenge faster than XML ‹ page 3 and ‘Thinking in Java’ has now turned to thinking in Flex. or JSON. “Flex really holds great performance benefi ts”, Eckel explained how he – as a Java programmer – ended he added, “which is extremely important for business ap- up using Flex to create user interfaces. “I fi rst tried the plications that have to deal with synchronization.” Client Java Media Framework, but it didn’t support MP3.” He side data management happens to be one of the bigger continued checking as many GUI libraries as he could, challenges for RIA developers. “Generally, a lot of time only to conclude that “mostly, these GUI libraries do one is spent writing synchronization code. Flex allows to skip thing well. But then you run into a wall for a lot of other most of that.” Adobe’s James Ward stepped in for a live things.” He ended up using Flex, “not only because it demo. “Synchronization is needed between the browser, looks nice, but also because there is vastly more in there the application server and the data store. Of course you than I had expected.” don’t want to write all of that code by hand.” Ward dem- onstrated how this can be done with Flex AMF3. He then Bruce Eckel, the author of ‘Thinking Eckel demonstrated how easy it is to program with Flex. expanded the demo to synchronization in a cluster and in in C++’ and ‘Thinking in Java’ has now turned to thinking in Flex. Looking We’re hiring IT professionals JEE developers - architects - functional analysts - project managers for a job? www.jobsinit.be Discover our job opportunities on www.xplore.be and meet us at javapolis Freedom works better. CSC is like a campus, a state of mind, where you get the professional free- dom to develop yourself as an individual and as a team member. With 87.000 employees world wide, our single mission is to put IT to work in practical, bottom-line ways. In Belgium, CSC helps large clients from all major market sectors to achieve real business results by the use of innovative solutions. We bring together the combined strengths of 500 professionals who all share the same client- intimate approach: we listen to our clients, respect their culture and their way of working, and work with them as a true team. CSC is currently looking for JAVA Consultants: • You have a Master or Bachelor degree. • You are passionate about technology, with an analytical and a solution- oriented mind. • You are an excellent teamplayer and you are willing to work in a dynamic and demanding environment. • You have good communication skills in Dutch, French and English. We offer you the possibility to grow into the role of Technical Architect, Application Architect or Project Manager. If you are interested in working for a world-class organization that strongly values independence and work-life balance, send your cover letter and CV (with reference “Java1207”) to [email protected] or visit our website: www.csc.com/be. 14 December 2007 3 Hot Talk! Every day, a steering comity member of JavaPolis doing some research recently to leverage the dynamic advises us what you should not miss at JavaPolis. and modular component runtime OSGi provides in an Stijn Van Den Enden helps us with our fi nal choices. enterprise system and must admit I’m a big fan of the technology ever since. If you want to know what OSGi Well, in the blink of the eye, it’s the fi nal day of the 2007 is bringing to Java then Peter Kriens’ session really is JavaPolis conference already. I really look forward to the place to be. today’s sessions; an interesting mix of technical and On the other hand Chris and Olav have been doing in- methodology oriented topics. teresting work in the area of Real Options. Real Options provides a different view on how you deal with making The day kicks off with an interesting session on Kanban. decisions, and isn’t software development all about tak- Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and to focus on ing the optimal decision within the context at hand? achieving a continuous fl ow of value to the customer. If you’re interested in optimizing your development process I’ve found Test Driven Development to be one of the further, you should defi nitely check out this session. most valuable practices in today’s Agile methods. Ne- vertheless it is by far the most diffi cult one to apply. Du- Next, I would recommend Evolving Agile. I really enjoyed ring this session Lasse Koskela, author of a book on this Scott W. Ambler’s previous JavaPolis sessions. Accord- topic, will give insight into the different kinds of variations ing to Scott it is now time to address the uncomfortable to the practice and guidance for doing it right. issues we prefer to avoid. Evolving Agile promises to be a very interesting session, one I would not want to miss. Looks like I’m going to conclude my JavaPolis week in After lunch it is hard to pick a session of choice. I’ve been true ‘save-the-best-for-last’ style. € ‹ from page 1 plications. “It allows the use of Java enabled games, explained. “We all want applications that cross all dif- the development of mapping applications, multimedia ferent devices, without having to rewrite them for ev- Increasing mobility applications, and more.” MSA CDC allows the use of ery type of device separately.” With this goal in mind, The three part keynote on RIA was concluded by Tim this type of applications on set-top boxes and smart- JavaFX offers a family of products, including the Ja- Kramer from Sun’s Consumer Solutions department. phones. Sun supports the MSA developer with the vaFX script language, desktop runtime and vertical “Why is Java ME to be cared about”, he asked. “Be- Java Wireless Toolkit for CLDC and the Java Toolkit stacks for mobile and TV. “The JavaFX script is actu- cause it’s everywhere around us already.” Two billion for CDC. And of course, NetBeans IDE is now avail- ally running on top of Swing, allowing an easier way handsets contain Java ME. That’s eight out of ten able in NetBeans 6.0. “We decided to Open Source to write Rich Internet Applications.” But there’s more handsets that were shipped last year. And there’s al- this, because that’s how we bring communities togeth- than just developer empowerment. “With FXMobile ways more to come. PlayStation 3 has Java running er and extend them”, continued Tim Kramer, giving an we can build applications that really are the window in the background as well. “We are going from MSA overview of Sun’s phoneME Project and the devel- to the user’s life: applications that allow interaction CDLD to MSA CDC”, Kramer said.