Adobe abandons Flex

Adobe recently published the roadmap of Flex which they had donated to Apache. Since Flex was already an open sourced project, that was a logical step. However, the recent document showed Adobe has already abandoned the Apache's Flex. Here is an interesting part from the document.

Flash Player 11.2 and Adobe AIR 3.2, which are anticipated to ship in the first quarter of 2012, will be tested with applications built using Adobe Flex 4.6. Adobe will test future releases of Flash Player and AIR against the Adobe Flex 4.6 SDK and maintain backwards compatibility for five years.

Although Adobe tried to make it look friendly with the "backwards compability" keyword, this statement just shows Adobe is not planning to integrate anything done on Apache to Adobe's Flash Runtime. Actually they also make the more clear.

In the past, features were added to Flash Player and AIR specifically to support the needs of Flex applications. Going forward, features will be added to the runtimes to support Adobe’s vision for the Flash Platform. The Apache Flex Project may choose to take advantage of those features; however, new features will not be added to the runtimes specifically to support the Apache project’s efforts.

I am not sure if that is a joke but Flex was widely accepted just because of Flash Runtime and if Adobe is not going to support Apache's Flex on their runtime, expecting them to build a Flash clone, they are just wasting Apache's time and resources.

Adobe also announced they are abandoning the Flash Catalist which was planned to be an important tool for the new UI Architecture called Spark. They had spent years to built a lightweight UI framework optimized for mobile from scratch while abandoning the long waited Flash Mobile. They blamed Steve Jobs for not letting Flash in iPhone but the moment Flash player appeared on Android everyone realized it was slow, not good to use on touch screen and draining the battery just like Steve Jobs once said. Instead of making investment Adobe just pulled the plug of Flash on mobile saying they would invest those resources into Flex and Air.

It is quite clear, Flash's future is not clouded and more... it just doesn't have a future...

Quoting Vader, Adobe I find your lack of faith disturbing! Sadly I can't just force grip to choke you.

Moving from 2011 to 2012, seriously!

I have done several new year posts (for 2008 and 2009) in the past. Reading them today once again made me remember the saying "be careful about predicting when future is involved".

Both posts clearly show I was a keen believer of Rich Client Platforms especially Adobe's Flex. The rise of iPhone which is followed by iPad and other mobile devices crippled the plugin based web platforms. Adobe who should already been working on mobile version on Flash, was never accepted on iOS but also failed to deliver a reliable Flash Plugin on other platforms. Finally this year Adobe discontinued mobile Flash in favor of focusing on Air.

The fall of the plugin based platforms let HTML5 get even more attention. Even Microsoft who still does not have a real HTML5 supported browser, killed Silverlight and announced HTML5 would be the main development platform for Windows 8 (aka Metro apps).

Despite all the trends there are still a lot of IE6 and 7 (also 8!) users which would make html5 hardly be used in real world projects. However many new web frameworks make use of available features and try to mimic the not supported ones. Still HTML5 might be too bleeding edge unless your project only aim to run on mobile since most of the mobile browsers do fully support most of the HTML5 features.

Android despite all patent issues, still on the rise. With the latest release of version 4.0, the ice cream sandwich, finally both phones and the tablets started running on the same operating system. However the version fragmentation became more visible. Even most of the phones still on sale are still based on version 2.2 or 2.3. Although many vendors announced upgrade plans, even most popular devices failed to updating 2.3. Besides the OS fragmentation, Android devices still lack nice designs and good build quality. Currently the only up to date device on the market is Galaxy Nexus and there are several nice designs such as Sony Experia Arc and Sensation XE/XL but still lacking updated os version.

Meanwhile Apple is still having their glory days. Although there were no major updates, iPhone 4s became a huge sales success. Everyone is waiting for the iPad3 which is rumored to have retina display. Although Apple is rumored to stop selling Mac Pros, Macbooks are getting popular than ever and if you ever had worked on one you would probably know why (if not, please try one! seriously).

Social media and apps are hot. Facebook and Twitter might have already taken the lead but apps like foursquare showed there might be room for more. So Google did not hesitate to jump in with Google+ which became the fastest growing network ever.  

So here are some keywords for 2012:

• Don't count on plugin based platforms (Flash, Silverlight and even JavaFX). At least for the next few years the web will be HTML...
• Learn Javascript! Although many frameworks might help you to generate js, still it is best to know the real thing.
• Invest in mobile! Forget about JavaME (seriously), even if you are lazy to learn Objective-C, you can easily start coding on Android.
• If you are an existing Flex/Actionscript developer, try out Flex for mobile! It is currently the easiest and most reliable way to build apps on both android and ios from one source.
• If you are not then no need to spend time on Flex. Instead learn coding on native or html5. Take a look at PhoneGap and SenchaTouch.
• NoSQL is hot. Give it a try!
• JavaEE6 became even more lightweight and exciting with WebProfile which made using Spring obsolete. You can use either TomEE or Glassfish which boots up just as fast as plain Tomcat.
• Invest in HTML5! Instead of starting from scratch try HTML5 Boilerplate and Bootstrap from Twitter.
• If you are keen on HTML5 on real projects, take a look at Modernizr.
• Unless you are a CSS master, try out {less} which might become a good HTML5 companion.
• CoffeeScript is getting popular. Again unless you are a Javascript Ninja, it is worth to try.
• Scala seems to be a good choice for next language to learn, well even Joshua Bloch says so...
• If you are brave enough to stay on the bleeding edge Play! is a great alternative web framework which also has built in support for scala.
• If you are looking for a solid, proven web framework while still able to use HTML5 features, GWT would be a wise choice. 
• Dart is new but it is worth to follow. Even if the Dart VM fails to be widely adopted it still has the option to cross compile to Javascript and the Google guys are experienced in doing that! 

GWT meets Flex: gwt4flex

2011 was definitely not the year of Flex. With the rise of the mobile devices including tablets, Adobe decided to step back instead of striking back.

Lately most of the web UI work I have been doing has moved to gwt from flex. I still feel flex is a great platform and enjoy coding in actionscript but have really doubts about its future. 

While I go deeper in GWT, I found out a very interesting project by Alain Ekambi. I downloaded and gave a test drive. Honestly what I had in mind was different from Alain's aim. I was expecting to find an easy integration of flex from gwt but what Alain had achieved was much more complex, building a Flex application (compiled swf) from gwt style code which is pure java.

I had been teaching and coding flex since version 2 beta, thus I feel very comfortable with actionscipt, mxml and event oriented programming. However not everyone feel that way and that was what Alain tried to achieve with gwt4flex which lets you to code in in GWT but compiles swf files offering a easier learning curve for Java developers.

I emailed Alain to see if I can achieve what I had in my mind, using flex components partially in GWT applications as if they were GWT components. Surprisingly Alain was kind and fast enough to implement what I wanted and sent me a beta jar in several hours.

GWT4Flex can be dowloaded on this link. The live demo shows a nice looking flex application, however, if you click the view source button what you will find out will be GWT style source code which does a client side pdf creation.

1. public class Gwt4FlexExplorer extends  FlexEntryPoint {  
2.    @Override  
3.     public void onLoad() {  
4.                 final Panel panel = Panel.newInstance("Gwt4Flex and AlivePDF");  
5.                 panel.setPercentSize(70);  
6.                 panel.setCenter(0);  
7.                   
8.                 final RichTextEditor richTextEditor = RichTextEditor.newInstance();  
9.                 richTextEditor.setPercenSize(100);  
10.                 panel.addElement(richTextEditor);  
11.                 Application.get().addElement(panel);  
12.   
13.                 ControlBar controlBar = ControlBar.newInstance();  
14.                 Button pdfButton = Button.newInstance("Export text to PDF", "demo/pdf.png");  
15.                 pdfButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, new FlashEventListener<Event>() {  
16.                     @Override  
17.                     protected void onFlashEvent(Event event) {  
18.                         if (richTextEditor.getText() == null || richTextEditor.getText().isEmpty()) {  
19.                             Alert.show("Please enter a text in the RichTextEditorControl");  
20.                         } else {  
21.                             PDF pdf = PDF.newInstance();  
22.                             pdf.addPage();  
23.                             pdf.writeFlashHtmlText(richTextEditor.getHtmlText());  
24.                             Application.get().saveFile( pdf.save(), "Generated.pdf");  
25.                         }  
26.   
27.                     }  
28.                 });  
29.                 pdfButton.setHeight(40);  
30.                 controlBar.addElement(pdfButton);  
31.   
32.                 Spacer spacer = Spacer.newInstance();  
33.                 spacer.setPercentWidth(100);  
34.                 controlBar.addElement(spacer);  
35.   
36.                 Button sourceButton = Button.newInstance("View Source","demo/code.png");  
37.                 sourceButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, new FlashEventListener<Event>() {  
38.                     @Override  
39.                     protected void onFlashEvent(Event event) {  
40.                         FLEX.navigateToURL(SourceCodeController.getSourceFor("RichTextEditor"));  
41.                     }  
42.                 });  
43.                 controlBar.addElement(sourceButton);  
44.                 panel.addElement(controlBar);  
45.             }  
46. }  

If you check Emitrom's website actually they offer much more such as GWT4Touch which lets you code in GWT style Java and use Sencha Touch in the background! 

Although I do encourage everyone to learn new languages, similar to Google's approach of compiling javascript from well known Java, Emitron's tools offer the most easy path for a Java developer to produce Flex or Sencha apps.  

Great work Alain!

JavaEE Revisits Design Patterns: Asynchronous

Although you may not find Asynchronous method calls listed as a design pattern, I find it worth to mention. So here comes the last post of my JavaEE Revisits Design Patterns series.

Asynchronous method calls is not much more than multithreading. Basically it refers to a a method call which would run in a separate thread, thus the main (caller) thread does not need to wait for the result of the execution of the called method. In the age of web programming, developers mostly delegate the threading issues to the running server and creating new threads can be tricky and sometime dangerous on web servers since they usually like to manage the threads themselves.

However, playing nice with the servers while using threads can be very simple with JavaEE. Annotating a method with @Asynchronous would be enough to tell the JavaEE container to run the called method in a separate thread asynchronously. To test asynchronous execution lets add a new method marked with the Asynchronous annotation to our previous example.


package com.devchronicles.observer;


import javax.ejb.Asynchronous;
import javax.ejb.Stateless;
import javax.enterprise.event.Observes;


/**
 *
 * @author Murat Yener
 */
@Stateless
public class EventObserver {
    
    @Asynchronous
    public void doLogging(@Observes String log) {
        System.out.println("1.Start logging:"+log);
        try{
             Thread.sleep(3000);
        }catch (InterruptedException e){}
        System.out.println("1.done logging");
    }
    
    public void doLogging2(@Observes String log) {
        System.out.println("2.Start logging:"+log);
        try{
             Thread.sleep(3000);
        }catch (InterruptedException e){}
        System.out.println("2.done logging");
    } 
}

The EventService class remains same except for few lines for logging.

package com.devchronicles.observer;


import javax.ejb.Stateless;
import javax.ejb.TransactionAttribute;
import javax.ejb.TransactionAttributeType;
import javax.enterprise.event.Event;
import javax.inject.Inject;


/**
 *
 * @author Murat Yener
 */
@Stateless
@TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRED)
public class EventService {
    @Inject
    private String message;
    
    @Inject 
    Event<String> event;
    
    public void startService(){
        System.out.println("start service call "+message);
        event.fire("this is my "+message);
        System.out.println("done...");
    }
}

Run the application and click on the button on the index.xhtml which would fire up the startService method. The log file should be something similar to the one below.


INFO: Observer was successfully deployed in 553 milliseconds.
INFO: start service call A message!!
INFO: 2.Start logging:this is my A message!!
INFO: 2.done logging
INFO: done...
INFO: 1.Start logging:this is my A message!!
INFO: 1.done logging

Although the log might differ, you should still clearly see the startService method is called which fired the event followed by the execution of the second logging method. The startService method waited until the execution of the second log method is complete. However, the first logging method started and end its execution independently from either of the other methods execution.

Although this example is based on void methods, its quite simple to use Future<> as a return type and to receive a result asynchronously.

Asynchronous annotation is very easy to use and can be very useful in situations where you do not want to wait for the execution of the called method.

JavaEE Revisits Design Patterns: Observer Part 2

As seen in the previous post, JavaEE6 offers an easy way to implement the Observer Pattern. After publishing the post, I had receive few questions on how to differentiate string types that are fired and observed.

Although in real world scenarios you wouldn't probably firing and observing plain strings but your own objects which would be observed by their type, still it is pretty easy to differentiate same type of objects and setup different observers to listen them.

First lets start with the part to differentiate plain strings.


package com.devchronicles.observer;


import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;
import javax.inject.Qualifier;


/**
 *
 * @author Murat Yener
 */
@Qualifier
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@Target({ElementType.FIELD,ElementType.PARAMETER})
public @interface MyEvent {
    
    Type value();
    
    enum Type{
        LOGGING, MESSAGE
    } 
}

The interface above will act as annotation to mark the string to be fired and later to be observed just by annotating the appropriate parts.

package com.devchronicles.observer;


import javax.ejb.Stateless;
import javax.ejb.TransactionAttribute;
import javax.ejb.TransactionAttributeType;
import javax.enterprise.event.Event;
import javax.inject.Inject;


/**
 *
 * @author Murat Yener
 */
@Stateless
@TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRED)
public class EventService {
    @Inject
    private String message;
    
    @Inject @MyEvent(MyEvent.Type.LOGGING)
    Event<String> event;


    @Inject @MyEvent(MyEvent.Type.MESSAGE)
    Event<String> anotherEvent;
    
    public void startService(){
        System.out.println("start service call "+message);
        event.fire("this is my "+message);
        System.out.println("done...");
        anotherEvent.fire("done with the service!");
    }
}

We just add MyEvent annotation with the desired type and later fire the events as we did before. The parts marked with red is all we added to the example in the previous post.

Now lets annotate the observer part. Again We will be just adding the red parts to the previous example.

package com.devchronicles.observer;

import javax.ejb.Stateless;
import javax.enterprise.event.Observes;

/**
 *
 * @author Murat Yener
 */
@Stateless
public class EventObserver {

    public void doLogging(@Observes @MyEvent(MyEvent.Type.LOGGING) String message){
        System.out.println("Observed:"+message);
    }



    public void doLogging(@Observes @MyEvent(MyEvent.Type.MESSAGE) String message){
        System.out.println("Observed another type of message:"+message);
    }
}

That would be all you would need to differentiate even the same type of objects to observe.