Download article - Methods & Tools

Jazoon
Java and Flex in Enterprise
The next two sessions that I attended were both about Java and Flex. In the first presentation,
Adobe Evangelist James Ward (http://www.jamesward.com/) did first a small introduction to
the Flex technology. Then he showed how it was easy to connect a Flex front end with a Java
back end using different protocols (http, web services) and benchmarked their relative speed.
All his demos are available on http://www.jamesward.com/demos/. You can check the insurance
one for a small taste of what a nice Flex interface can look like.
The second presenter, Florian Müller ( http://www.richability.com/ ), put a different perspective
on the marriage between these two technologies with his experience on a large project that was
involving both of them. The development of the application can be very easy, but the
maintenance is more difficult as functions can be performed either at the client (flex) or server
(level). Architecture rules have to be defined very well and synchronization between the server
and the client is not easy to maintain.
Flex 4 solves part of these problems, but the proposed life cycle (Photoshop - Catalyst - Flex)
does not work well when you have go backwards and redo some things. In the tools that you can
use to link Java and Flex, he recommends Granite
Value of Objects
Kevlin Henney presented a lively talk about the concepts of object and value in software
development. Kevlin is a lively and wise presenter, so don't miss this guy if you have the chance
to be at a conference where he speaks. His talk was a kind of philosophical musing even if he
was always firmly rooted in programming.
It is difficult for me to summarize all the ideas that were discussed, but here are some nice
quotes excerpted from this presentation (I hope to be precise, but all misunderstanding are my
own responsibility):
* As a profession software development do a mess of words
* If you are using java.util.date, you must be tired of life
* Typing is not the bottleneck in software development
* Every time a mock returns a mock, a fairy dies
* Don't confuse the ideas of the programming language with the essence of what you are trying
to express.
Maven 3.0
Matthew McCullough http://www.ambientideas.com/ made a very pump up presentation of the
improvements that will be available with Maven 3, currently in its final beta testing period. The
new version will be faster and have a smaller footprint, due to a codebase reduced by 30%. The
software has been transformed in a code library that allows a better integration with third party
tools. An important improvement is the possibility to define your configuration in different
languages (ruby, groovy, scala, clojure) with polyglot maven. http://polyglot.sonatype.org/. He
also presented the last version of m2eclipse http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/ that he likes for its
ability to visualize dependencies and to provide tools for an easier refactoring.
Slides of all the presentations of Jazoon are available on the conference web site
http://jazoon.com/. Videos will be published late on the excellent Parleys web site:
http://parleys.com/
Methods & Tools * Summer 2010 * Page 77