Blog.Project13.pl

This week I went to the “12th Śląsk Java User Group Meeting” in Gliwice (12 Spotkanie Śląskiej Grupy Użytkowników Java) (which is like 90min away from my hometown Cracow), but it was really worth the ride! Sadly I got there 30min late, and thus missed the intro but the rest of the presentation was really interesting and really well prepared (by Zbyszko Pałka). The main topic was, as you can guess by the image to the left here, FLEX and how to use it with Java (Spring + Blaze DS + PureMVC).

Zbyszek created a simple example application. A simple contacts list, with the frontend done in flex. Simple yet good enough to show off all the basic ideas and interactions in such an application. The best thing about the presentation was that he constantly pointed out what could be done better, how something should or should not be done etc…

All in all using flex as an frontend seems to me just as a javascript/ajax replacement with “shiny and cool” effects, not really increasing the value of a product oferall… Well, I guess being “shiny and cool” can be attractive to some clients, or flex could be a v. good solution if our service would rely heavily on media steraming etc… That’s the better usecases  I see for flex at this moment I guess. The very big downsides are IMHO the horrifying amount of code duplication and relying on strings or other identyficators which we call (events etc) a little out of nowhere – the strings etc have to be the same in ActionScript and Java, this makes refactoring an even more delicate process… Zbyszko also noted that after developing a big app for a long time, the code is very “esoteric” and “magical”, and introducing new team members can be really a pain… That said, neither me, nor some Team Leaders present at this meeting would use this tech after seeing it – It was very interesting to see real devs criticize some tech they’ve just seen in action.

I hope to be able to go over to Gliwice every two weeks to listen/learn something from these real developers :-) Upcomming topics propably will include JBoss (I’d love to learn about this) or GWT (less code duplication than here!)…

PS: Next week I’ll be attending an FLEX meeting sponsored by Adobe at my University – They’ll try to show FLEX as some kind of god-like-solution I guess… The more happy am I that I already was shown what in reality sucks in this technology from a practical java-developer view point… ;-)