Free RIA training

I normally don't pass on these kinds on things, but this one could be very nice.

The Adobe Enterprise Developer Program is sponsoring a FREE full week RIA training session in San Francisco April 25-29.  They will be presenting an in-depth curriculum including the Flash Builder 4 Crash Course, Data Services Data-Driven Development (that's the stuff I work on!), LiveCycle Collaboration Service, and LiveCycle Mosaic ES2.

This seems like a pretty nice deal and you can't beat the price - FREE!

For more information or to register: http://adobe.ly/eRIASanFran

This space is not intentionally left blank.

The "Internet is written in ink".  This is one of the great lines in "The Social Network", a movie I highly recommend.  As someone said at the Golden Globes, Arron Sorkin made people typing at computers look exciting.  In the spirit of that, I realize that going months between posting on a blog is a sure fire way to ensure no one will read your blog when you DO have something to say, and that the Tom Jordahl "internet brand" will not be maintained at its high level.  :-)

My excuse this time, as it has been before, is I have been heads down making the software.  This time the next major release of LiveCycle Data Services, what we will probably call version 4.5.  Why 4.5 when the last version was 3.1?  Well, because we like confusing folks but mostly because we want to align our version number with Flex in the same way that we align the BlazeDS version numbers already.  So before we had Flex 4/BlazeDS 4.0/ LCDS 3.1.  Some time this year all the numbers will be the same.  So that will be less confusing we hope.

We have some good stuff coming this year, we will continue to build on the Fiber Data Model development paradigm which makes is super simple and fast to define your data model and deploy it to LCDS to get Data Management functionality using Hibernate/JPA persistence without writing any code.  We are expanding the Java and ActionScript code we generate from the data model to give you more control and customization abilities in your applications.  We are expanding the client options to include Java, HTML5 and various mobile platforms.  We have some amazing integration with SAP services.  And I have been working on some real nice enhancements to Flash Remoting to make it simpler to develop applications that use the various features of Data Management without having to change from the RPC-style of thinking.

I hope to be able to post more about these great new features in 2011.

Speaking at RIA Unleashed Boston - Nov 11-12, 2010

I have been scheduled to talk at RIA Unleashed this year in Boston.  I will be talking about (and showing some demos) the upcoming LCDS-Next release support for non-Flash clients, including HTML5, Android and iOS.  We have some really exciting stuff coming up in this area.  You can read my session description here.  For those attending, I will be in the 11:15am slot on Friday.

As a plug for RIA Unleashed, I have attended and spoken here before and it is a really great conference. It is just the right size for really getting an opportunity to engage with your peers who are working on client or server side of Rich Internet Applications.  If you are in the Boston area, I highly recommend it.

Model Driven Code Generation post from Matt Butler

Matt Butler has posted some good model driven code generation information on his brand new blog. See the post here.  LCDS 3.1 has the ability to generate JPA annotated JavaBeans as well, and if I don't find the time to post about it, perhaps he will!

ColdFusion Survey

The ColdFusion team is looking for feedback on ColdFusion 9 and your wish list for the next major release. They have put a survey up at: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ColdFusionServer.

Now is your chance to influence what goes in to the next version!

Blog spam and MAX 2010

I am getting tired of deleting spam comments on the previous blog entry, so I thought I would add a new one just for variety. I wonder why the particular spammer is able to get around the Google captcha that is required to post, but every week or two they post to the last entry in my blog.

In other news, It has been confirmed that I will be speaking at MAX 2010. The tentative plan is for me to run a BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop) session on the new Offline features in LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 for Flex and AIR. I have never done a BYOL, just a hands-on lab session, so this is going to be a "learning experience". This is a really a neat and powerful feature, so I hope folks will come away with a good idea of how they can use this feature in AIR apps that can go offline.

See you there!

Duplicate session errors

Alex Glosband, one of our lead QA engineers on the LiveCycle Data Services team, has posted a very helpful and informative description on why certain Flex applications might get the error:

Detected duplicate HTTP-based FlexSessions, generally due to the remote host disabling session cookies. Session cookies must be enabled to manage the client connection correctly.

Check out the full discussion on his blog: http://www.alexglosband.com/?p=3

Photoshop 20th Anniversary Film "Startup Memories"

This is worth the 18 minutes to watch:

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/photoshop-20th-anniversary/startup-memories/

In this 18-minute documentary, produced by the Adobe TV and Adobe Content Strategy & Service teams, John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances that came together at just the right time spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.

One thing that stood out for me was near the end when one of the creators talked about hearing from people who said "Because of PhotoShop, I have a career". This is one of the most important reasons why I spent over 10 years of my profession life working on ColdFusion - the fact that what I helped create had thousands of users who made their living using it. That what I did for my job made a major impact on others. There really isn't anything more that a software developer can ask for. At least this software developer.

LCDS 3.0 has hit the streets

LiveCycle Data Services ES2 version 3 is now available.

Download the free developer edition.

LiveCycle Data Services documentation is available online:

* Using LiveCycle Data Services HTML | PDF
* Application Modeling Technology Reference HTML | PDF
* ActionScript Language Reference HTML
* Installing LiveCycle Data Services HTML
* Javadoc HTML
* Release Notes HTML
* Quick Starts HTML

Model Driven Delopment

Wow, its been three months since my last posting. I wish I could say that I have been using twitter to express all my thoughts to the web, but I don't use twitter so that wont work. :-)

Anyway, we are on the cusp of releasing LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3.0 which has some really exciting improvements in how you can create Flex applications that use the LCDS Data Management functionality. I could wax poetic for a few hundred words, or you could watch Christophe Coenraets excellant MAX 2009 session on model driven development. He really shows off why this is such a giant leap forward in productivity and usability.

Dean Harmon and I did a very successful (I think, and the evaluations seem to agree) hands-on session about this same topic, but the hands-on sessions were not recorded.

You can get the "almost final" LCDS 3.0 bits on Adobe Labs right now and give this stuff a try.

LiveCycle Data Services 3.0 Beta videos

We have just published a set of videos (9 so far) that show off some of the new features in the LCDS 3 beta that has been available up on Adobe Labs for the past few weeks.

Of particular note is one that I recorded on how you can extend the new Fiber Assembler to customize the server side management of your data.

Check all the videos out here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/

LiveCycle Data Service 3.0 Beta available

We launched LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3 public beta yesterday on http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/.

We have beefed up tooling and simplified developing flex application development. You can now develop new fully functional flex applications with no server code in under 10 minutes. We have a few videos to help people get started http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/, and plan to add more (I am on the hook for one or two).

Now is the chance for folks to try out the new Data Model development features we have added and give us some feedback.

ColdFusion 8 Performance Tuning

Check out this new Dev Center article written by Kunal Saini - Performance tuning for ColdFusion applications. Lots of good information on VM tuning, Administrator settings and CFML code writing.

Brendan Meutzner on LCDS and CF

I recently had an email exchange with Brendan Meutzner about a problem he was trying to solve when using an integrated ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services system. He wanted some way to use dynamic data sources in his LCDS assembler CFC. He blogged about his problem and the solution here.