Yakov Fain is a managing principal of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters" in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Currently Yakov works on the book for O'Reilly "Enterprise Application Development with Flex".
Of all domestic air carriers, I like Continental the most. They showed Mamma Mia and the food was bearable. Last month, I was in the air for 14 hours flying to Japan, and now the trip across the USA is a piece of cake. I have only carry luggage with me. This small bag has all the cloth...
I’ll just give you one example. Last week my colleague and I were running a private Flex workshop for software architects of a large corporation who are about to start development with Flex. Needless to say that they are smart and experienced software professionals. Some of them alre...
AIR adds to Flex has a pretty straightforward API for working with local files and directories. There is a simple mechanism of installing and upgrading AIR applications. If you want, you can digitally sign them too. AIR 1.5 introduces local encryption, which means that you can encrypt...
Reading conference speaker's agreements may reveal some interesting gems. Since I don't have a PR agent, I have to make the following public statement by myself: "I'm not going to damage anyone's reputation (including developers of PureMVC framework) for abuse of design patterns. I'm r...
The new release of IntelliJ IDEA supports the widest range of modern tools and frameworks, right out of the box. To name a few: UML, JBoss Seam, Spring 2.5, RESTFul Webservices, Flex Debugger, advanced Flex editor, and more
In a week, I’m going to San Francisco. This will be my first Adobe MAX conference. Five thousand people will attend this major technical event. My tracks are Flex and AIR. I’m arriving early, to attend one of the pre-conference workshops on Sunday. On Monday evening, I’ll be mode...
SpringSource is an executive member of JCP. Rod Johnson, its representative, is planning to bring a healthy dose of paranoia and openness to the body that guides the future of Java.
Two months ago, I’ve created a group called Adobe Flex Experts on LinkedIn. More than 100 Flex developers/bloggers joined this group since then. I posted there the following question: "If you could add just one feature or suggest an improvement, what would it be? Please keep the resp...
It's simple and minimalistic, has a small memory footprint and is easy on the CPU. Flash player works fine on my Windows XP box. JavaFX developers should like it too.
During the last several years JEE became a stable and mature but not too exciting environment. People routinely were bashing JEE for not being cool and a number of Java developers defected to Spring trying to get high. But JEE6 looks really interesting.
I'd like to share with you my experience of working with LiveCycle ES 8.2. This strong player in the BPM space version has been released in July of 2008.
I recently gave a presentation on Flex frameworks at the New York Flex Users Group. More than 50 people showed up, which proves that this is an important topic. By the end of the presentation the temperature in the room had increased because an innocent talk had turned into a heated di...
Friday is a big day for people having urge to get a hold of the new iPhone 3G. 8AM. Sharp. Apple stores open their doors and those who didn't mind waiting in line for a couple of days (in Hawaii people formed lines 6 days ago) will get this baby.
Food Dial is not just a book of recipes. Here's the big idea - you came back home, tired and hungry. Start the Food Dial application and open the fridge. Here's the red pepper. Turn the dial with food categories...
Flex is a great way to introduce rich Internet applications to your enterprise. However, in the real world, you often have to do it gradually. Most business units of any enterprise that are sold on RIA would prefer adding Flex-based components to their old but working Web 1.0 applicati...
In the mid nineties, IT job market was good. PowerBuilder or Visual Basic plus SQL would get you employed in no time. Good old client/server days. Two programming languages was all you need. When multi-tier architecture became hot and J2EE came into picture, all of a sudden you'd have...
I'll be speaking at the SOA World Conference in NYC this Monday on using rich Internet applications as service consumers in SOA architecture. As the conference faculty member, I can invite a small number of people to attend it for free (Golden Pass). If you'd like to use this offer, ju...
If you are planning to hit the job market, you may need to refresh some of the Java basic terms and techniques to prepare yourself for a technical interview. JDJ Enterprise Editor Yakov Fain here offers thirty of the core Java questions that you might expect during the interviews, 20 f...
Jun. 17, 2008 06:00 AM Reads: 764,077 Replies: 176
I received an email stating that AOL finally abandoned the ugly Java applet that was used in the ICQ2Go, the Web version of the hugely popular (about 30M users) instant messaging system. The person who sent me this email also wrote, 'IMO this was the last popular Java applet. Now the k...
Keynotes are often boring, but watching today's keynote from WWDC conference was just great. I do not want to repeat the facts about iPhone 3G. Needless to say that I'll buy a couple of them this summer. I do not want to bore you with the facts about the countless possibilities that op...
Yesterday I realized that Friday's calendar was wide open, so I decided to take the Adobe Flex 2 Developer Exam. I knew plenty of other ways to kill a Friday, but I had to take this exam. I had no choice.
The popular code generator Clear Data Builder will become available free of charge. Originally, Clear Data Builder was released as a command-line open source code generator a.k.a. DaoFlex. We've submitted it to Adobe Flex component exchange about two years ago, and it quickly became on...
Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. Since Flex is an open source product, you have a say in this too. Obviously, there's a hope that upcoming Thermo release will bring together developers and designers. I'm c...
I like reading stuff in pdf format. But it's even better if you can easily create pdf files. By easily I mean a button click. Literally.Since I have Adobe Acrobat, my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint just have an extra menu to create it. But it's kinda boring. Let me share with you a cou...
I spent last week in India attending the Great Developer Indian Summit (GDIS) that took place in Bangalore, in the Institute of Science, one of the most prestigious graduate schools in the country.
In today's cooking class you'll add to your cookbook a delicious recipe. It's quick and won't cost you a dime. I'm sure you've been in one of these situations when you have unexpected guests arriving in 20 minutes and need to make a good impression. Let's create an application that ...
Flex 2 was released in the Summer of 2006 and it was a mini-revolution in the RIA space. Almost nobody knew about Flex 1.5, but now almost everyone has at least heard about this software. Flex 3 was released in early 2008. It has a number of useful new features, but it was not a major ...
Many young programmers don't read books anymore. They google. They argue, 'When I need to find a solution it's just a click away. Why bother purchasing books that are outdated by the time of printing? Real programmers learn by doing - trial and errors'. I do not agree with this.
I know, it's not nice and I should behave as if it's not that important to me, but I can't. During the last two and a half years I've been writing, openly speaking, whistle-blowing, and whispering that AJAX is a wrong way to go for developing rich Internet application. But 99% of the s...
The real bummer is that Java 6 is not there. Who should we blame for it? Steve Jobs who openly states that nobody uses Java anymore? There are about 5 million professional Java developers around the world. Can you give them a good reason to buy MacBook Pro? I can't.
Vectors supporting types are the part of next release - and are billed more of performance/coding help then language enhancement. Most of the Java 5 constructs are not really applicable to ActionScript 3 - for fair comparison you need to use Java 7/8 with dynamic scripting language sup...
This was the first time I've included into the list of the RIA players a little known product called Curl. Even though this language was created in MIT, it's mainly used in Japan. I had a chance to spend an hour with Curl folks today, and it seems that this language may be a good fit ...
This caught me by surprise. Isn't it a bit too soon? One of the most interesting features of this Flex release is configurable modules. This new release also features lots of new controls. I like the grooved panels. The Web site to promote the new Flex is done in Flex too (finally!).
Fast-spreading rich Internet applications require new skills for development of what was known as boring-looking enterprise applications. In the past, development of the user interface was done by software developers to the best of their design abilities. A couple of buttons here, a gr...
These days RIA tools are created mainly to two groups of people: Web Developers and UI Designers. The second group is represented by creative people who can design screens but are not programmers. Big guys are trying to come with tools that would bring together these two groups of peop...
Sun Microsystems is a very respectful company, with strong engineering spirit and talented software developers on staff. Sun Microsystems was the company behind the very first technology to support rich Internet applications. Yes, I'm talking about Java applets that were introduced in ...
These are the notes from Adobe Education Designer and Developer Conference that Adobe put together for people who are teaching Adobe software at various universities around the country.
Yakov Fain is a managing principal of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters" in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Currently Yakov works on the book for O'Reilly "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". 
Reading conference speaker's agreements may reveal some interesting gems. Since I don't have a PR agent, I have to make the following public statement by myself: "I'm not going to damage anyone's reputation (including developers of PureMVC framework) for abuse of design patterns. I'm r...
The new release of IntelliJ IDEA supports the widest range of modern tools and frameworks, right out of the box. To name a few: UML, JBoss Seam, Spring 2.5, RESTFul Webservices, Flex Debugger, advanced Flex editor, and more 
In a week, I’m going to San Francisco. This will be my first Adobe MAX conference. Five thousand people will attend this major technical event. My tracks are Flex and AIR. I’m arriving early, to attend one of the pre-conference workshops on Sunday. On Monday evening, I’ll be mode...
Two months ago, I’ve created a group called Adobe Flex Experts on LinkedIn. More than 100 Flex developers/bloggers joined this group since then. I posted there the following question: "If you could add just one feature or suggest an improvement, what would it be? Please keep the resp...
It's simple and minimalistic, has a small memory footprint and is easy on the CPU. Flash player works fine on my Windows XP box. JavaFX developers should like it too.
I recently gave a presentation on Flex frameworks at the New York Flex Users Group. More than 50 people showed up, which proves that this is an important topic. By the end of the presentation the temperature in the room had increased because an innocent talk had turned into a heated di...
Friday is a big day for people having urge to get a hold of the new iPhone 3G. 8AM. Sharp. Apple stores open their doors and those who didn't mind waiting in line for a couple of days (in Hawaii people formed lines 6 days ago) will get this baby.
I'll be speaking at the SOA World Conference in NYC this Monday on using rich Internet applications as service consumers in SOA architecture. As the conference faculty member, I can invite a small number of people to attend it for free (Golden Pass). If you'd like to use this offer, ju...
Adobe has published their first plan of what should be included in Flex 4 that is scheduled to release next year. Since Flex is an open source product, you have a say in this too. Obviously, there's a hope that upcoming Thermo release will bring together developers and designers. I'm c...
Vectors supporting types are the part of next release - and are billed more of performance/coding help then language enhancement. Most of the Java 5 constructs are not really applicable to ActionScript 3 - for fair comparison you need to use Java 7/8 with dynamic scripting language sup...
Fast-spreading rich Internet applications require new skills for development of what was known as boring-looking enterprise applications. In the past, development of the user interface was done by software developers to the best of their design abilities. A couple of buttons here, a gr...
Sun Microsystems is a very respectful company, with strong engineering spirit and talented software developers on staff. Sun Microsystems was the company behind the very first technology to support rich Internet applications. Yes, I'm talking about Java applets that were introduced in ...
