Today Adobe released another document that brought tears into my eyes. Why they think that people are dumb? Why not just say, “We couldn’t figure out how to monetize Flex and we’re getting rid of the ballast”? Adobe is a public company, and, beside developers they have investors and th...

During the last month my colleagues and I were immersing into the world of modern JavaScript frameworks. We didn’t start from scratch though. My business partners spent the first 5 years of this century porting PowerBuilder, a used-to-be-popular client server tool, to a JavaScript fram...

I always get excited when I see another person questioning the use of frameworks that ask you to either replace one language with another or write additional code as a life support to sustain the framework’s functioning. This time my kudos to Christin Gorman, who did a great job explai...

Back in the seventies, I’d been taking entry exams to the Kiev Politechnic Institute (KPI). I lived in the Ukraine, which was a part of the Soviet Union. At that time people of Jewish descent had a really hard time getting into most of the colleges and universities. Typically, there ...

I don’t like most of the Flex MVC frameworks cause they force me to write more code. I do like frameworks and tools that let me write less code. But there is no free lunch and, at some point, even productive frameworks, tools, and libraries reach critical mass and the finger pointing ...

This was an interesting bug… I was working on a Web application, where Adobe Flex client was sending an instance of an ActionScript WrapperObject to the Java server, which was supposed to invoke some JBDC code to run an SQL Insert statement saving the data from the Java version of Wrap...

Sasha Piskun is Tiggr’s Chief Architect. Sasha recently moved to Exadel’s Concord office from Exadel’s Donetsk office in Ukraine. He has many years of experience designing and building large enterprise applications. We are very happy to have him in Concord where he leads Tiggr developm...

During yesterday’s Flex training the students had to install an Adobe's sample application "Tour De Flex". Everyone did. Everyone but one student was able to run this application. He was getting a weird error “An Internet connection is required” even though he was online. No proxies. ...

If you are developing a distributed application, you can’t get by with any single technology. You’re using at least one programming language and one or more frameworks. I work in the world that requires Adobe Flex and Java EE knowledge. To develop a front end I use, at a minimum, HTM...

Passing a technical job interview is a challenge to most of the Java developers. Some people simply fail because they are not well prepared and questions like “What’s the difference between abstract classes interfaces?” puts them into a comatose state. In such cases Mr. President won...

Pricing software can be more difficult than creating one.  There are companies who do just this – pricing software for others.  Setting the low price brings more customers but requires more investments into customers support. Higher prices simplify customers support, bu...

More than a year ago, Sofia was abducted from her home in Lighthouse Point, Florida, by her Syrian National uncle, who is practicing medicine in the Chicago area. Last March, a Florida judge issued an order to pick Sofia up from the uncle's house in Chicago and return her to her home t...

I've recorded our chat with my colleague Anatole Tartakovsky who leads the mobile development at Farata Systems. We were discussing approach for migrating existing legacy enterprise RIA to these shiny iPads, Xooms and the likes.   You can listen to this podcast on any MP3 pla...

I occasionally start small projects for friends or family. I intentionally use technology I have not used before in order to learn new things. The client gets something, I learn something new. It's nice also, because it forces me to finish the projects. Last year, I started writing a ...

First, there was One Tier, and it was good. Back in the eighties, there was one mainframe and users’ dumb terminals were connecting this one and only Big Iron. These 3270 terminals were called dumb because they had only a keyboard and a monitor. No CPU. It was simply an I/O device. Tw...

Earlier this year, in an interview for Oracle, I made a statement defending hacking. Yesterday, I found a thread on theserverside.com where java developers were sharing their view on the subject. In this blog I’ll take the same two quotes there ignited some arguments and will try to ex...

We absolutely love the analogy between the advent of the car 100 years ago and the increasing importance of cloud computing today. While Harms and Yamartino focus on economic comparisons, we believe there’s a real aesthetic comparison as well: specifically, we think many SaaS vendors (...

You know by now not to open unexpected email attachments, but what if someone that appears legit sends you a PDF? How harmful can it be? As it turns out, very. This week a harmless-looking invitation to a Nobel Prize ceremony was a nasty piece of business indeed. When saved to a hard d...

Fifteen years ago there was no iPhone and Android. Web browsers were hot. Netscape market share was over 90% - they didn't have competition.The situation changed when Microsoft has introduces Internet Explorer (me too, me too). Back in 1998, there was an infamous law suite betw...

Last week I was thinking about design of the main view of a new project for a new client of ours. This application is interesting in that it can deployed as an enterprise RIA as well as a tool to be used by any consumer connected to the Internet. The mockup of the main view looks cl...

Mr. and Mrs. President Bashar al-Assad: At the tender age of 17 months my severely ill daughter Sofia, an American citizen, was abducted by her mother on Monday, July 26, in Istanbul, Turkey, and taken to Syria. I was informed yesterday by Sofia's mother that she will not be comi...

Have you ever attended software training? If yes, have you enrolled voluntarily or your employer required you to get re-trained to get extra points for your annual review? If so, was that class useful other than getting these points? In my blog “Notes of a traveling contract trainer ”...

It's been almost four months since our book “Enterprise Development with Flex”  been released in print by O’Reilly.  Since day one, it remains in Amazon’s bestseller’s list in several IT categories. This giv...

Adobe should cut its losses with Apple and target its flagship Flash Player at telecoms carriers, independent analyst Ovum has claimed in a new report*. With the spat over Apple's refusal to support the Adobe Flash technology on its iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices continuing to ...

Over the course of my career, I've been running lots and lots of training classes on software development. I still do. Teaching software takes 15 - 20% of what I do for a living - the rest is work on real-world projects.  These days I mostly teach Java and Adobe Flex courses, but ...

I was not planning to write this post. It was ignited by the “Disappointed with Flex” article posted by Valery Silaev, our lead Flex/Java developer. I’ve been working with Valery on a couple of projects. He’s good software developer. And when he says that he’s disappointed with Flex 4...

The core of Flash Player is the Tamarin Virtual Machine, which is an open source project under Mozilla. While the SWF file format is not fully open, it is documented by the community on osflash.org. Additionally, there are numerous open source products that read and write SWF files. T...

Remember Hamlet and the quote, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"? While in this case it isn't a lady, the question still applies to Apple's CEO. Steven P. Jobs posted a 1,700-word letter on Apple’s Web site on Thursday, explaining the company’s decision not to allow the multi...

Six months ago I started following Adobe's advancements in the creation of a cross-platform solutions for smart mobile devices. In general, it's nice that finally Adobe realized that it's time to do something about the close to zero penetration of Flash Player in mobile space (I'm talk...

Apple won't kill neither Flash Player nor Adobe. Yes, Steve Jobs is going slightly mad. He goes against all rules in the industry, and there's no logic in his statements. For example, today Apple allowed Opera browser on iPhone violating their own non-compete rule for accepting applic...

Ever since the PDF's payload began carrying images, file size quickly became an issue. As people began adding larger and larger images into their PDF it took longer to transmit these files and the space in which they were stored filled up faster. Luckily image compression technologies ...

Design of enterprise clouds incorporate multiple dimensions (security, data,service brokering, infrastructure management, etc..) and one of the most critical to understand is the impact of latency. With Network vendors starting to provide 10GigE connections, switches and fabric, and gi...

An award-winning content management system(CMS), an open source solution to build your own website and online application, a totally free and easy-to-use tool available for everybody……that is our topic today, Joomla!. New users to Joomla! and have no ideas how to start? No problem, he...

Pardon me for adding yet another iPad analysis (certainly, when a computer product launch makes it into Doonesbury, we have crossed a new threshold of hype), but one thing actually missing from the copious words and videos on yesterday’s event at Moscone was the simple fact that we hav...

Apple users are nothing if not dedicated. The landmark form factor and user interface innovations the company has ushered in over the last 25 years have created a fiercely dedicated customer base. There are Mac clubs, iPhone fan sites, and even online photo collections of Apple logo ta...

The Ubuntu team has decided to take a different approach to development for the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu. Lucid Lynx, which is slated for an April 2010 release, will benefit from these changes through increased stability, more focused agile development and a tight...

There are lots of reason you may need to customize the access to given fields within an entity.  For example, HIPPA compliance requires that some data not be exposed to only employees with a need to know. This example works with Silverlight 4\RI...

Yeah, it's this time of the year. Again. Making predictions is so tempting... This year I'll cover just the iPhone. Apple will let Flash Player on iPhone no later than October ’10. They don’t have a choice, if they want to stay competitive. Enough of a crippled Web browser already. Act...

HFS Wrapper is a popular and reliable Mac OS X file system. The HFS+ volume could be made to contain within the HFS file system volume in a way that make it look like the HFS volume and not the HFS+ volume to your system

So what do you really look for in an interface engine? There is more to an IE than just being a pass-through of messages.