Juixe Techknow

Dave Britton of Vertigo was at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008 and gave a presentation on Silverlight 2.0. Dave highlighted that there is a tight integration between ASP.NET and Silverlight. Silverlight also has rich tooling support with Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Blend. Dave also recommended Silverlight Spy, you need to be using Silverlight Spy if you are doing any sort of Silverlight development. A large portion of the talk elaborated how to have multiple Silverlight components coordinate and communicate with each other via a Silverlight/HTML/JavaScript bridge. Also known as the bridge to nowhere. A debate erupted as to having on large Silverlight application versus multiple Silverlight applications working in cahoots in a single web page. The speakers main reason for breaking an application into separate pieces is for code and component reuse.

Some in the audience also questioned the speaker as to why to Silverlight instead of common and mature AJAX toolkits such as ASP.NET AJAX. Again the speaker had to defend Silverlight, this time totting Silverlight’s rich media support.

The speaker also demoed how to bind data to a table grid in Silverlight. After seeing Silverlight in action I thought it should have been called MS Flex. The parallel between Silverlight and Flash runs like the long tail.

Technorati Tags: silverlight, dotnet, flex, flash, ajax, webdev

Andres Almiray gave a presentation on Java 2D and Groovy at Silicon Valley Codecamp 2008. Andres started the session by highlighting some key benefits of Groovy’s language features. For example, in Groovy setters and getters are explicitly created for you by simply defining a property, semicolons are optional and the return keyword are optional. Parenthesis are optional in many cases. Groovy strings are sexier, known, as GString short for Groovy Strings, and provide string interpolation familiar to Rubyist and Perl programmers. Even return types are optional in many cases and to this Andres said, “the def keyword is like var keyword in JavaScript.” Another highlight of Groovy’s features are closures. Andres said, “We don’t know if we have closures in Java 7, Groovy has closures right now!” After highlighting Groovy language features we where reminded of Groovy’s mantra: Groovy is Java, Java is Groovy.

After introducing Groovy to the audience, Andres demoed GraphicsBuilder. GraphicsBuilder is to Java2D what SwingBuilder is to Swing. The builder pattern is commonly used with great effect in Groovy due to the languages dynamic and reflective nature. GraphicsBuilder can be used to draw basic shapes, those included in Java 2D which is not much, and many more shapes like stars, triangles, balloons, crosses, arrows, donuts, etc. GraphicsBuilder has import and export to SVG via Batik and has partial experimental export to Flash’s SWF format. Andres recreated JavaFX demos simply using Groovy and GraphicsBuilder.

Technorati Tags: java, java2d, groovy, builder, graphicsbuilder, swingbuilder, svg, swf, flash, javafx

The Silicon Valley Code Camp is happening this year at Foothill College on Nov 8-9. There are over 100+ scheduled sessions lined up with nearly 1000 developer attending. Although you need to register, attending the Code Camp is free. Looking at the scheduled session, it will be a very diverse conference with talks on Open Source, Java, C#, and Web Development. Speakers include Douglas Crockford of Yahoo, Paul King of Groovy in Action, Bill Venners of Artima, Arun Gupta of Sun, Karthik Gurumurthy of Wicket, David Pollak of Lift, Andres Almiray author of several Groovy Builders, and a ton of other Bay Area coders and hackers.

Some of the session talks that I am most interested in attending include the following…

• GridGain – Java Grid Computing Made Simple, Nikita Ivanov
• JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas Crockford
• Introduction to Building RIA with Adobe Flex and AIR, Abdelmonaim Reman
• Introduction to Spring Web Services, Pyounguk Cho
• Building Rich Applications with Groovy’s SwingBuilder, Andres Almiray
• The Feel of Scala, Bill Venners
• Rails powered by GlassFish, Arun Gupta
• Ruby Meta-programming, Bala Paranj
• Building Enterprise RIAs with Cairngorm Microarchitecture, Abdelmonaim Remani
• Develop Rich Internet Applications using JavaFX, Sridhar Reddy
• Flex and 3D UI, for games and more, Vic Cekvenich
• Introduction to Grails, James Williams
• Lift: a simply functional web framework, David Pollak

Technorati Tags: java, c#, os, webdev, javascript, ria, flex, air, glassfish, ruby, grails, lift

Apple recently dropped the Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) that developers had to agree to develop iPhone applications using the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK). The NDA prohibited iPhone developers from writing tutorials, guides, blogs, books, and even wikis about the iPhone SDK. Apple has always been overbearingly protected and goes so far as to have attendees of their World Wide Developer Conference agree to such an NDA as well. But since the NDA has been lifted on the iPhone SDK many publishers have announced the release dates of books aimed to assist in the development of iPhone applications. Here is a list of upcoming books devoted to the iPhone SDK.

• Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
• iPhone SDK Application Development: Building Applications for the AppStore
• The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK
• iPhone SDK Development
• iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web and SDK Development
• Practical iPhone Projects

If you are new to the Apple development platform, in particular Objective-C of XCode, here is a short list of books that can also be of help.

• Xcode 3 Unleashed
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
• Programming in Objective-C
• Learning Cocoa with Objective-C
• Building Cocoa Applications : A Step by Step Guide

Technorati Tags: apple, nda, iphone, itouch, sdk, appstore, objective-c, touch

Joshua Bloch has a good tech talk on How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters that he does from time to time in the conference circuit. He outline that talk with one liners, he calls them bumper sticker API design. Below are some of my favorite bumper sticker API design advice, if I had a wide enough car.

• All programmers are API designers.
• APIs can be among your greatest assets or liabilities.
• Public APIs, like diamonds, are forever.
• APIs should be easy to use and hard to misuse.
• APIs should be self-documenting.
• Example code should be exemplary.
• You can’t please everyone so aim to displease everyone equally.
• Expect API-design mistakes due to failures of imagination.
• API design is not a solitary activity.
• When in doubt, leave it out.
• Keep APIs free of implementations details.
• Minimize mutability.
• Minimize accessibility.
• Don’t make the client do anything the library could do.
• Obey the principle of least astonishment.
• Use consistent parameter ordering across methods.

Technorati Tags: effective java, software, design, api, bumper sticker, bloch

Here are the Ruby and Rails related technical talks given at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention 2008. A PDF of the presentation is availble for each talk, but no video at this time.

• Ruby 1.9: What to Expect
• Metaprogramming in Ruby
• What Has Ruby Done for you Lately?
• An Introduction to Ruby Web Frameworks
• Advanced ActiveRecord
• Extending Rails: Understanding and Building Plugins
• Groovy vs. JRuby
• Web Frameworks of the Future: Flex, GWT, Grail, and Rails

Technorati Tags: ruby, jruby, rails, oscon, flex, gwt, grails, metaprogramming