Andrew Powell

This past Friday, I gave a presentation, "UX For The Development-Minded" at RIA Unleashed.  It went really well, but I have to admit, the audience got short-changed.  I actually cut a lot of content out, about one third, because it was orginally written to be a longer form presnetation for 360|Flex.  Well, I'm happy to say that you can see the entire presentation, unabridged, at 360|Flex San Jose in March of 2010 because I just got notice that I will be giving the full presentation.  Let's call this version the "director's cut."

Go make sure you register today!

Brian put on a great event this past Friday at Bentley University.  The attendance was more than most other conferences I've been to this year.  I am wondering if these one-day events are the way that conferences should be trending.  The content was great (amazing speaker lineup) and the location was great.  

I gave an overview of some Experience Design concepts, from a developer's point-of-view.  Here are the slides, but I really feel that without the rest of the preso experience, but here they are if you want them.

My Slides

As many of you know, Universal Mind grew from the ashes of Macromedia Consulting.  At the time, there was no talk of Web 2.0, Flex, or anything like that.  We grew our business on ColdFusion.  ColdFusion is in our DNA.  It's always been a part of what we do, but lately I've heard rumblings from the community that Universal Mind has abandoned ColdFusion.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  

While people have been saying that Universal Mind has left ColdFusion behind, we have been quietly building up our ColdFusion talent with some of the strongest people in the community.  Some are names you know, some are names you do not.  Chris Scott, Dan Wilson, Laura Arguello, and Dan Skaggs are just a few of the great ColdFusion developers we have working with us.  

Yes, we build RIAs.  That includes Flex, AJAX, Silverlight, and the technologies that power them, including ColdFusion and Java.  We've got some of the best Java talent around too, but that's a post for another day.  This all means that we can build not only your RIA, but the complete solution from back to front.  When it comes to building ColdFusion back-ends for your Flex application, nobody has more experience than Universal Mind.    

So despite rumors to the contrary, our ColdFusion practice is very much alive and kicking.  What do we build?  Enterprise Class Rich Internet Applications, including those powered by ColdFusion.  After all, ColdFusion is in our DNA.

In listening to people complain about different languages (MXML, AS3, Java, ColdFusion, C#, etc), most everything someone lists as what they love/hate about the language is a function of the IDE.  The IDE, in turn, is usually built around the functionality of the language.  I guess what I want to know from you is, would you be less down on a language / technology if the IDE was better to work with?  In Java, if you don't like Eclipse, you can go to IntelliJ, and vice versa.  The .NET languages tie you into Visual Studio, for the most part.  Flex, until recently, was limited to FlexBuilder.  Anyway, your thoughts on the issue would be appreciated.

Does the IDE influence how much you love / hate a language?

IntelliJ IDEA, the most kick-ass Java IDE available, is now out and better than ever.  The main thing about 7.0.4 is that it now has great support for Ruby/JRuby.  This means that, essentially, IntelliJ is a viable Ruby IDE now, as well as a Java IDE.  It's also got some support for Flex, but it's not quite ready for prime time yet, IMO.

What's new in 7.0.4

The other day I heard someone define iTunes as a RIA. I started to correct them because, until then, I had only thought of RIAs as being built with AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, etc; with these new RIA technologies. That comment though, got me to thinking. What does really define a RIA? Is it the technology that is used to build the application or how it leverages the power of the Internet (via SOA, etc.)?

After a bit of consideration, I have to say that an RIA is any application that leverages the power of the Internet to enhance the application. An RIA is not simply an AIR application, a Flex application, an AJAX application, or a Silverlight application. Any application that uses the internet to leverage new user experiences is a RIA.

So, that being said, iTunes is probably one of the best examples of an RIA out there. It changed the game when it came to music applications, adding the ability to subscribe to podcasts, share your library, listen to Internet Radio broadcasts, and the iTunes store itself transformed iTunes into the most ubiquitous and indispensable RIA we've seen yet. All that and it wasn't even built in Flex, AJAX, OpenLazlo, Curl, or Silverlight. It was built in Objective-C.

In the coming months and years as we see RIAs and the influence of SOA proliferate through ordinary desktop applications, we're going to have to take a long hard look at how we, as a community, define a RIA. I think we're heading towards a point where we really do define a RIA as any application, regardless of the development language, that leverages the Internet to deliver new user experiences to the end user. In the end, it would seem, we are all RIA developers.

I updated my bookshelf page the other day.  I added 10 more books which, as an RIA developer and consultant, I find very useful.  Click through and take a look, then buy from Amazon, or your favorite book store.

My Bookshelf

It looks as if Aptana is getting closer to rolling out Jaxer with the release of their RC "B" version. Many of you may be asking: "What the hell is Jaxer?". Well, Jaxer is billed as an AJAX server. Basically, it is a server platform that gives you the ability to write your server-side code in JavaScript. Is this really what we need, another server?

Let's see a show of hands. How many of you out there in the RIA space are only JavaScript coders and know NO server-side language? Do you really want to rely on JavaScript for your server-side code? I sure don't. We have many platforms that do the server-side really well: J2EE (I'm including ColdFusion here), .NET, Ruby On Rails, PHP, etc. Why do we want to leverage JavaScript on the server? Someone please tell me the benefit. That makes about as much sense to me as the people who want to leverage AS3 in ColdFusion. At what point do you just take the plunge into a high-level language?

We already have these great server-side solutions that do their job really well. The new middle tier's job is going to be quickly and efficiently delivering data to RIAs and less and less focused on generating HTML for the browser. It's coming. Just watch. With all the solutions we have, and where the middle tier is going, Jaxer is not going to be a viable solution. It can't handle web services well, it can't handle any sort of Flex remoting, and we still don't know how it performs under load. Jaxer is, and always will be, a way for client-side developers to get their hands into the server-side of things. I think RIA developers are looking for more. Will Jaxer be able to deliver? My guess is no.

I've been getting a curious response from some of the people I've told about the latest addition to my skill set.  When I tell them that I've taken the dive into Ruby on Rails (RoR), the first question they've asked is "Why would you want to do that?".  Well the answer is quite simple.  Around the middle of the year each year, I make a concerted effort to learn a technology that I'm not familiar with yet.  Last year I got into Spring/Hibernate, Flex was the year before.  This year, I've decided to double my efforts.  This year, I'm committing myself to the dual challenges of learning RoR and Silverlight.

I have long contended that any developer, as long as they have a solid background in a structured language (Java, C++, etc) can easily pick up any other programing language once they get past the rudimentary syntactical differences.  I believe this fact (I learned in C++ back in the day) has allowed me to pick up languages quickly and add to my value as a developer and a consultant.  This foundation has helped me professionally because I have been able to increase my value to my employer, year over year.  It has also helped to keep me sharp as I often find myself switching between 3-4 different languages in a given work day. Without this challenge I'm sure I'd grow complacent and my skills would drop off at some point.

So, am I bragging?  No.  I am challenging you, the complacent developer, to take the time, take the plunge, choose something you don't know but have been wanting to learn and dive into it head on.  It can be Flex, C#, Java, Ruby, PHP, whatever.  Just choose your target and go after it with passion and a desire to make yourself better and make yourself a better developer.

So I've been getting in to Ruby on Rails a little bit lately. In the course of my investigation into RoR, I took a look at JRuby, which lets you run Ruby scripts from within Java. Well, within ColdFusion, we can access Java objects as well, hence we can also run Ruby scripts from ColdFusion. How do you do this? Well, I've wrapped it up nicely for you into a little CFC called RubyLoader. You can find RubyLoader as a project on my Google Code site.

RubyLoader will read a ruby script, execute it, then give you access to any variables that were returned. You can then access those variables, just like you would any other variables in CFML.

A special word of warning here. This only works with ColdFusion 8 because it requires Java 6 for the included version JRuby to work properly. If you are not running ColdFusion 8, YMMV.

Read more, and download RubyLoader from SVN at my google code site.