Well, it’s now official, I’m writing a book. I’ve signed my contract, and there’s no turning back now. “You’re going to do what?” you may ask. My friend and cohort here at Pillar, BJ Allmon and I have begun the adventure of writing our first book, our first not only writing together but our first for each of us, tentatively titled “Flex on Java” for Manning Publications. Yes, Manning, you know those guys with all the great “In Action” books with the funny looking people on the covers. I’m really excited about this because I’ve always felt they put out good quality books, let’s hope that we don’t ruin that trend.
How we got here is kind of an interesting story. I’ve always been a big fan of RIAs and had looked at Flex a few years back in one of my “I hate HTML” phases and really fell in love. Unfortunately the price tag was really expensive and could never show a ROI on this really cool framework that provided such a rich user experience. Fast forward a couple of years and Adobe has acquired Macromedia, and decided to open source the Flex Framework as well as create an open source fork of their LiveCycle Data Services and now it is possible to do Flex development without spending a dime. So I decided to pick up a Flex book and re-acquaint myself with RIAs, only to struggle to find a good title that would show me how to integrate Flex into my everyday job as a Java developer.
A few months back I had somehow gotten on Manning’s list of people they call on to do manuscript and proposal reviews, and I had reviewed a proposal on Flex and AIR, and it looked interesting. Come to find out the authors pulled out at the last minute, and they were looking for someone to write a title on Flex. So, for whatever reason, I’m still not quite sure exactly why, I opened my mouth and volunteered. After a couple of exciting conversations with the publisher about what I thought would make a good Flex book, I decided to recruit BJ and put together a proposal.
Keep your eyes peeled for the MEAP to show up on Manning’s site in the near future. In the meantime I plan on blogging about the experience, when I’m not up to my ears in writing this book.
