Mark Barton, Duncan and myself attended the Flex London User Group last night (August meet), its been a while since its been run, so it was a perfect time to pile in, it was hosted at skillsmatter’s new place up near the barbican so the normal clean well appointed facilities (coffee/tea, wifi, etc etc) were provided.

The speaker was Mark Doherty who writes the http://www.flashmobileblog.com/ and unsurprisingly his talk was on the latest updates on the flash and air players with particular reference to mobile devices, all new stuff to me, if you head over to his site he has videos of all the stuff he demoed and you can even watch the podcast of it all here ,which saved me doing screen shots and writing loads of details, but some key point for me were:

• They now have remote debugging on the air platform on at least android.
• Multiple flash/flex instances now have a priority order so that when a CPU is pressed for power it can give all the effort to the in-focus app while lowering things like screen refresh (but not back ground stuff like audio).
• Due to different vendors using different chips, the accelerometer and geo locator functions vary from device to device.
• You can swap target runtime at anytime rather than only on project creation.and some little useful bits are:
• If you press and hold on a flash app in a browser on a mobile device, a mobile menu pops up with options like full screen.
• The new TFL (Text Framework Layout) is very heavy on mobiles, avoid if you can.
• 128 dithering in photoshop really helps make the image smaller and is good for mobile apps.Everyone was very friendly and I met some good people, unfortunately I left after the talk, next time I think I will do it properly and pop down the pup with the die hard’s as that is where the real learning and fun begins. but it was a good beginning.

  Oh, also discovered on the groups home page a comment from Bill Buchan and if thats not an endorsement I don’t know what is 🙂 .

The Adobe Flex London User Group (an evening starting at 18:30) is starting back up again, hosted by skillsmatter in central north London (next to the barbican) first meet on the 2nd of August, its free, you can register Here. I will be there, so I hope will Mark Barton and a few more Domino people

Note: This it not treacherous to Domino or false advertising (if you have reached here via planetlotus). I have long held the opinion that any thing that can be glued to Domino to make it look good or expand its functionality is something that should be pursued also I have learnt much from the Lotus LUGs I have attended and hope to learn the same from the pure flex boys ….so there

Jonvon’s excellent post can be found here, it deals amazingly with an issue that has been troubling domino developers for a number of years,

Personally I adopt a slightly lighter view on the whole subject, I have not been a true Domino developer (in the classic sense) for a couple of years now, I have just been a web app developer who uses Domino a lot, the idea of being specific to one brand or platform does not really bother me, I just use what ever the client has installed or what ever best solves the problem, I know and develop on Jboss but I do not consider my self to be a Jboss developer, so many of us are so used to domino providing all we need that we forget that it is just a bunch of tools glued together, it is a server, it is a DB platform, its a programing environment, use what you need where you need it, play to the strengths, bypass the weaknesses, hopefully Domino wont die like that, it will just evolve (cause its presence in a project wont be all or nothing).

Domino will live on, on my CV as long as I can get work and deliver to my clients with it, and quite frankly it contains the best and friendliest bunch of people that i have found in any online community.

P.S. the reason that this post does not appear on planet lotus as I don’t want to be seen to be piggy backing on Jonvon’s far superior post, but I’m just having a private(ish) vent.

On with my preparations for the suspected tapering off of my role at my current main client, first part…TRAINING

Training is one of the things that all techs like to do differently, personally i like a combination of videos i can have on repeat in the background and building practical apps to solve problems. but their are some core bits that i recon that everyone on a training frenzy should have

1) vmware workstation (or virtual box or parallels or what ever rocks your boat), if your not using virtual machines, then start!!, with them you can mess about and try things, then bin them when they go wrong, top tip: build a ‘core machine’ and clone it each time you want to play with something new, that way you don’t waste time building up the base OS each time you want to try something.

2) http://www.safaribooksonline.com , the cheapest and best way to get at all the technical books you could want for one price, they also have a really good line in videos included in the price, yes i know all about the practical side being the important, but as i have discovered with flex and spring, that just because you are making it work does not mean you are doing it right, so OFFICIALY RATIFIED base theory is needed as well (especially for interviews), understandably safari had “stuff all” new Domino training material, but all is not lost (more on that later),

now on the to individual things i have to learn

Flex 4 and Adobe Air

Thankfully this is as easy as ever with adobe really leading the way when it comes to documentation, all varieties of learning stuff can be found at http://flex.org/resources with my personal fav being the “flex in a week” video and work sheets (already updated for flex 4) found at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/

Xpages

Next up is xpages, now i hear there is a book coming form the powers at IBM, but alas i cant wait, and actually i don’t have to (ha ha!), because there is good resources out there from the community, the 2 important ones being:

http://xpages101.net/ (a paid for video training site produced by Matt White who co wrote IBMs internal xpages training course,and has presented on xpages at every ‘lug’ and notes conference you can mention, the content is excellent though as i know Matt as a mate I’m always the expecting him to say at the end of each lesson “so that’s done, shall we go for a pint”),

http://xpagesblog.com/ (a community technical blog that is stuffed full of juicy xpages bits and an excellent read)

There is also a spectacular 40+ series of xpages articles that i have lost the link to (will dig up and update here)

Granite Data services

This is just a “just build the darn thing and make it work” job but to my relief the guys and gals at http://www.graniteds.org have written very good documentation thank you, found at http://www.graniteds.org/confluence/display/DOC/Documentation+-+2.1

Jquery

God damn where to start, hundreds of good sources, lots of them free, but of them all i ended up with the purchased book “JQUERY: NOVICE TO NINJA” found at http://www.sitepoint.com/books/jquery1/ then worked my way thought the some usefull looking jquery pluggins taking them apart ( http://www.gmarwaha.com/jquery/jcarousellite/ and http://bassistance.de/jquery-plugins/jquery-plugin-validation/ )

Spring

This is such a hideous subject, that you just have go to http://www.safaribooksonline.com and look thought all the myriad spring books they have until you find one you like the style off, then sit down with a pack of head ache tablets and grind your way through it, you will swear a lot, then suffer an moment of Epiphany after which its just a case of filling in the mad java developer “lets make this elegant” gaps.

Adobe illustrator

Strangely Adobe aren’t as good on this as they are on flex (maybe because they have everyone by the short an curlies on it as a market leader) so its back to http://www.safaribooksonline.com where there is a excellent video series and the normal good books, practice practice party people

Android dev

This is a bit like jquery in that there is simply tones of content, I’m going to use a mixture of http://developer.android.com and http://www.safaribooksonline.com content combined with practice apps ( although as i don’t have a android phone I’m using the a vmware image of the live android image http://code.google.com/p/live-android/, thanks to the wretch for pointing this one out)

Right, back to work!!

As a contractor you know in the back of your mind that nothing can last, but humans tend to prefer a warm fluffy feeling and try to forget this fact, however my largest client has taken on a large outsourced company (its pretty much a run of the mill outsourcing, nothing that reflects badly on the company, I’m presuming its being done so that someone somewhere gets a tidier company org chart as in the long term it sure as hell is not going to save them money, i heard the phrase “strategic partnership” and thats never a good sign), unsurprisingly said company has moved to ‘acquisitive’ mode as soon as they had their foot in the door (to be fair they would be daft if they did not), this means that i suspect that time is limited (hence the countdown timer on the side of this page).

I however have more time (hopefully) to cater to this movement than lots of other people do in similar situations, and my CV is nearly as i would want it, but it could do with a bit more shinning, will therefore be trying to get the following down pat in the next few months, even if I’m wrong such a exercise wont do any harm at all.

Need to get a grip on
Granite Dataservices
Flex 4
get better at Xpages (compared to my other domino dev, i suck)
get better at Jquery (i use it but don’t UNDERSTAND it)
get better at Spring (i have practical knowledge but would suck at a formal interview)
Adobe illustrator (im ok in a “its C.A.D in colour” way, but want it for the flex 4 skinning and chibi images which means i need to be better)

Time Permiting
Android dev
Adobe Air

Its a lot of work but i have 160 days, now i just have to stop working for clients all the time so i have time to learn something (mixed blessing)