Been awfully quiet lately as I am concentrating on finishing my book (http://manning.com/allmon), but this was some great news that I had to share.
The makers of the best Java IDE have just announced that they are open-sourcing their IntelliJ IDEA product and offering a community edition for free now. You can read about it here (The Most Intelligent Java IDE — Now Free and Open Source).
Over the past few months my co-author and I have been working hard at reworking much of what we have already written for our book in order to hopefully result in a much better book for our readers. Earlier today Manning released a letter explaining the delays in any updated chapters to those who have purchased a MEAP subscription to our book. The letter reads as follows:
We would like to take a minute to personally update you on the progress of our book. Although we are running behind the originally estimated release date, the end product will be a much better learning experience. From the beginning we have been continually refining the book and have taken the great feedback we’ve received to align the book more closely to your thoughts and insights. If you are receiving this letter and were part of the reviews, THANK YOU! Much of the feedback received, all helpful, really matched with how we (the authors) were feeling and helped us to really home in on what we felt would be important to include. Here are just some of the things that can be expected out of the new and improved Flex on Java.
Developer accessibility
When we started the Flex on Java journey we wanted to write a book that would assist Java developers in refactoring Java applications with the richness of Flex. Unfortunately, the sample application wasn’t a good fit for everything we wanted to teach and was absorbing too much of our time trying to make it work properly for the readers. The sample application was an open source product that was not easy to download, build and go. This issue caused us to rethink our approach and we turned to Matt Raible’s AppFuse framework that is aimed at helping developers build applications quickly and efficiently. AppFuse makes deployment and creation of the sample application a breeze and also opens the door to developers who are new to Java. It allowed us to focus more on the topic of integrating Flex with Java while broadening its audience to those who are not Java or Flex gurus.Hit the ground running (faster pace)
The free chapter available will become an introduction to the book and chapter 1 will now get readers rolling with development on the first page. Chapter 1 will begin with developing the server-side application with the AppFuse framework and then quickly begin integrating Flex in chapter 2.Deepening focus on Flex integration with Java
The faster tempo and more narrow focus on the topic of Flex and Java integration allows us to quickly go deeper in that topic. We will discuss how to use BlazeDS to connect to the Java server-side including POJO services, Spring services and Spring security in more detail. We will also include working with real-time JMS applications utilizing the Flex and Java APIs.More focus on scalable frameworks
Good developers move from technology to technology and look for frameworks that allow them to avoid the common problems when designing an application. Frameworks for doing both dependency injection for creating loosely coupled applications and Model-View-Controller (MVC) will be explored in more detail. Frameworks such as Spring ActionScript, Cairngorm, and Pure MVC (and possibly others) will be demonstrated.House cleaning
There are other topics like building the application with Ant and setting up continuous integration that are important but not part of the main gist of the book, so we moved those topics into the Appendices of the book. There are other housecleaning items that are being performed to make this the best book possible on integrating Flex with Java.We hope that you will be delighted with the upcoming changes to the book. Please feel free to provide us with any feedback you may have for us. Thanks again!
Sincerely,
BJ Allmon and Jeremy Anderson
Authors of Flex on Java
I’m going to be presenting at the GRJUG meeting this week giving a whirlwind tour of Groovy. Not sure how I’m going to fit as much as I’d like to in a one hour bite sized chunk, but it’ll be interesting nonetheless. If you’re in the Grand Rapids, MI area on March 19th around 6:00pm, stop on by. Here’s the announcement…
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few years you’ve probably heard of Java’s much hipper cousin Groovy. In this presentation we’re going to begin to explore the Groovy language from the ground up through a series of unit tests. We’ll start with some of the very basic concepts such as Strings, collections, looping, conditionals, exception handling, truth and introduce you to closures. With any luck we’ll cover enough of the basics to prepare you for future presentations where we’ll start to dive into the Grails framework and look at more advanced Groovy features such as meta- programming and building DSLs.
Presenter Bio: Jeremy Anderson is a software craftsman for Pillar Technology Group, an Agile consulting firm in the Great Lakes area. He is a self- proclaimed autodidact, constantly tinkering with cutting edge technologies such as Groovy, Grails and Flex. He’s been developing web-based applications on the JVM in one shape or another for over 5 years. He’s currently co-authoring a book on integrating Flex with Java for Manning Publications due out later this year, and even occasionally finds time to write on his blog. When he’s not sitting behind a keyboard hacking away at code you can usually find him out on the single-track on his mountain bike or sometimes even on foot.
I threw my hat into the ring this morning with this submission to the Agile 2009 conference (http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/node/579). Please check it out and submit any comments you may have as I refine the proposal.
This past Saturday we held the first in what I’m hoping many CodeRetreats. What is CodeRetreat you ask? CodeRetreat started as a discussion between Nayan Hajratwala, Patrick Wilson-Welsh, and Corey Haines at CodeMash 2009 just a few short weeks ago about creating a meetup where developers could come together and practice good software craftsmanship with the guidance of a few select tomes of good software craftsmanship such as Bob Martin’s Clean Code. Many of us are stuck wading through legacy code day to day in our normal 9 to 5 jobs and don’t get the opportunity to hone our skills and that is exactly what the CodeRetreat is about. That and the opportunity to get to pair with great minds like Ron Jeffries, Chet Hendrickson, Bill Wake, Corey Haines, and J.B. Rainsberger, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »
Well the 2/3 review of the book I’m currently writing, Flex on Java, has just been wrapped up and we’ve gotten some wonderful feedback from our reviewers, both good and not so good. I’m learning that the not so good reviews are sometimes more useful in helping us to refine and improve the book in the long run. More than one reviewer had commented, and I had started to believe this myself before the review even began, was that the sample application that we had decided to use was too cumbersome and involved too many workarounds to make it work. Read the rest of this entry »
As you may have heard, I am currently writing a book (http://manning.com/allmon) on how to integrate Flex into a Java based web application. When we started this project, we had many ideas for what we were going to do for a sample application to use throughout the book. Too many titles out there either use trivial or incomplete examples that work well to showcase as much of the technology as possible but usually fall short in giving the user a clear picture of how to develop an end-to-end solution. So my co-author and I, through suggestion from a fellow developer, decided to base our sample application on the XPlanner project.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
BJ and I have decided to throw our hat into the ring and submitted a session proposal to the Agile 2008 conference. You can read about it and comment on it on the Agile 2008 submission site here (http://submissions.agile2008.org/node/1676), or I’ve copied the summary below.
In 2002 Macromedia used the term “Rich Internet Applications” (RIA) to describe the next generation of web applications that have all of the benefits of a traditional desktop application, with the flexibility of being deployed via the Internet.
However, it’s 2008 and RIA has not been able to penetrate the business application sector with any real success. The old days of RIA are history. (Maintenance nightmares, weird or no unit testing, and little friendliness toward other agile developer practices.)
