initRIA-07 Post Event Report

December 22, 2007 in AIR, RIA, flex, initRIA, silverlight
Tags: AIR, flex, india, initRIA, RIA

We had a wide range of talks ranging from Ajax to flash/flex, and we had a chance to witness some of the most amazing applications built on flex/flash platform during the event.

Around 130+ people were expected to attend (based on the registration) but around 65 people turned up.

The list of the topics presented on the day:-

A) Data Visualizations in Flex – Raghunath Rao, Adobe

As pointed out rightly by raghu, every motion on the screen has a meaning-he clearly illustrated the power of flex framework in data visualizations and bowled all us over the new features that flex 3 is coming with in data visualizations arena. Key take away in this session was some of the amazing visualization capabilities in flex 3 such as advanced data grid-which offers the charting capabilities, tree data structure data in Datagird itself. Drawing out another chart with the data region selected on one chart was one of most impressive feature offered in flex 3.Advaced Datagrid is one of its kind and comes geared with capabilities which can leave a huge impact on data analysis and visualizations arena.

B) RIAjaxified – Rakshith, Adobe

Rakhshith is from coldfusion team at adobe and have worked a lot on the Ajax framework

He put light on asynchronous and synchronous techniques used in AJAX. His focus was to showcase the RIA capabilities of AJAX and how client side programming in JavaScript with server side processing that can deliver XML fragments back to your web page to allow the page to be updated with new information from the server without having to reload the entire web page.

Key learning from his sessions was the understanding of how AJAX delivers Rich Web applications which precisely has the following methodology:-

• XHTML and CSS standards based presentation
• Interaction with the page through the DOM
• Data interchange with XML and XSLT
• Asynchronous data retrieval with XMLHttpRequest
• JavaScript to tie it all together

 

C) Designing RIAs with RC Pattern – Yash Mody, TeknoPoint Multimedia

Yash shared his experiences and challenges that he faced while working on RIA projects and RIA application development processes. While working on these applications he came out with an approach called RC (Rapid Correct) approach.

His approach addressed the following concerns

-Change in the look and feel of the application takes longer time.

-Adding a new call will take a long time.

-Flexibility of the code

-Understanding of the working of the application

From the development point of view his approach centered on use of web services in Flex based applications. Singleton classes were the main ingredient of his approach. His approach came in as the collection of the best practices used while developing a flex based RIA and that was the key learning of the whole talk.

D) Flash for flex developers – Bhavin Padhiyar, SAP

Bhavin is both flex and flash certified developer; his sayings came in handy where in he showcased the use of flash scripts/classes being used in flex. He demonstrated the use of flash timelined objects being created in flash and then being used in flex. The most important point and the key learning of the whole session was that with the use of flash we can add custom animation in flex.

Flex have set of animations which can not be customized as far as the different pattern of the animations and the timeline is concerned, this can be done in flash and then can used in flex.

The creation of flash animations leads to creation of flash classes which can then be imported in flex and can be attached to any object in flex. This made us realize that all the flash capabilities can be used in flex and add more colors to the existing palette of flex. Some of the web applications which are already using these capabilities are http://www.harley-davidson.com, www.Sherwin-williams.com.

E) Building Live Documents – An online Office suite leveraging RIA technologies

Sumanth Raghavendra and Adarsh Kini, InstaColl

This was one session that went over the edge and took us all with a surprise.

Sumanth and Adarsh are the CTOs of the installColl a startup company which has Sabeer Bhatia as their chairman of the board. The company has come up with a concept called Live Documents which is a unique solution that layers on persistent security, access control and management capabilities onto desktop productivity tools. With Live Documents, our normal Word documents and Excel spreadsheets are transformed into auto-updating entities that have Wiki-like capabilities. Sumanth mentioned that they would be able to roll out their product by March next year. There experiences with the flex technology blew our mind and the captivating demo kept us stuck on our seats.

F) Optimizing Flex and AS3 – Mrinal Wadhwa, SAP

Mrinal’s session was one of the most interesting sessions which explored the benefits of adopting best practices and suggested some of the techniques to optimize AS3 code. His session was the major take away of the event. Strict data typing and using absolute positioning in the layout of the flex application is one best practice which puts less load on to the AS Virtual Machine and is less expensive. He stated that Flex Virtual Machine is very fast as compared to AS2 Virtual Machine and in some tests carried out it performed equally well as Java Virtual Machine.

He put light on actionscript server side and client side optimization as well.

G) Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm Micro architecture Debabrata Acharjee, CapGemini

Debabrata put light on the importance of Cairngorm Micro architecture. The Cairngorm Microarchitecture is a lightweight yet prescriptive framework for rich Internet application (RIA) development. This architecture is nothing but a Design pattern based framework for RIA Development. The architecture comes really handy in enterprise wide applications and not usually in case of small scale applications. He pointed out that the implementation of the design patterns (the patterns that have been selected for the micro architecture) and the future roadmap for Cairngorm development are firmly aligned with the feature set – advertised and anticipated – of the Adobe Flex platform, and the emerging ecosystem of tools (such as Apollo) around the Flex platform.

The benefits of the Cairngorm architecture are realized when developing complex RIA applications with multiple use-cases and views, with a team of developers, and with a multi-disciplinary development team that includes designers as well as creative and technical developers. The whole session was very interactive and had an active participation from the audience where in people asked if the existing applications can be turned into a cairngorm micro architecture type application and the answer of the question is yes.

Birds of feather

This was a random session on RIA and their future, we had random discussions on RIA and technologies like Silverlight and we saw a bubble animation test of silverlight (JavaScript and CLR) vs. DHTML vs. flash (Flex) vs. WPF vs. APOLLO vs. Java (Swing).We later had a demo of a tool for Test Management System called Zephyr (http://www.getzephyr.com ) built using Flex.

Read more on initRIA experiences and post event thoughts here, here, here, here, here and here

Check out some pics of the event here and here

All in all initRIA Rocked and we all had a great time!!