In the last few years India has emerged from being a small outsourcing destination to a large computing powerhouse (especially as far as programming resources and their critical skill sets go). Its one place that boasts of millions (not just thousands anymore!) of Java programmers. One reason for this growth has been the love for Java among enterprise customers up here in the United States, who outsource work down to India, and another has been the continued support from Sun and its affiliates (many of who train around its well recognized certification programs) in providing ample training and mentoring infrastructure in India. Yet, one more important reason has been the use of Java (over its traditional counterparts — i.e. C & C++) as the language of choice for instructional purposes in teaching programming languages at educational institutions. Finally last but not least, Java is easy to learn and there is too much out there on the web to help you get started :)
In the last couple of years Java has seen strong competition from two directions. The growth of Rich Internet Applications (Ajax and Flash platform based) got many Java programmers to use non-Java UI technologies with there Java servers and the advantages of dynamic languages (like Python and Ruby) lured the Java programmers away from the language towards efficiency and “more-with-less”. This phenomenon is global but local impact (in the United States) has so far been the greatest. However, it got me curious to see how these changes were impacting the millions in India. I started out by finding out the “State of Flash based RIA Adoption” by engaging in a conversation with an active developer and community leader to get a feel of what’s its like out there in the field. I plan to cover Ajax and the dynamic languages related discussion in subsequent posts.
Without further delay let me provide snippets of the online discussion I had with Abdul Qabiz, a person who actively spends a lot of time working on RIA and is a popular figure among Flex developers in India. He is employed with Yahoo! and let me mention upfront that his views and opinions are entirely his and not his company’s.
Hope you get an interesting insight into what’s brewing among developers in India. If you have questions, clarifications or comments then (as always) please speak up!
Here comes the snippets from the convesration —
(ST: Shashank Tiwari and AQ:Abdul Qabiz)
ST: Abdul, some of us have seen you as an active member of the Flex community, but could you please introduce yourself to those who may not know you yet!
AQ: I am a self-taught passionate programmer from India and have been involved with Macromedia/Adobe Flash Platform for over eight years. I have worked on various technologies and platforms, but Flash Platform is something that has always been close to my heart.
Currently, I work for Yahoo! Bangalore as Senior Web Developer where I focus on all web technologies not just Flash/Flex. I have worked in Adobe Flex team in Bangalore and contributed to Flex 1.5 and Flex 2.0 release. I was a Senior Architect in Mixercast, which uses Flash Platform quite extensively.
I am part of various flash/flex related group but flex-India is the place where I am relatively more active. I have a blog (http://abdulqabiz.com/blog), where I write about technology in general but particularly about the Flash Platform (Flash, Flex, FlashLite, AIR, etc).
ST: Could you tell us a bit about the Flex community in India. How big is that? How vibrant is it?
AQ: Flex community in India is growing day by day. For example, we had less than a hundred members in Flex India a year back and now the number has gone up to over a thousand (1000+). These are the members in just one of the groups (Flex India). These are members who take time to participate in mailing-lists, groups, blogs and more. I am very sure, there are more people who are actively doing development but not yet participating on user groups for some reasons (unawareness, busy or something else).
There is a large community of flash designers and developers, who are part of various smaller groups like iGeeks (formerly Indiammug), indimad, flashgroup and others, who are starting to use Adobe Flex/AIR.
I think, we would see more growth in the next one year. With Adobe AIR, AJAX developers would also become part of this growing community.
ST: What is you role in the organization (Flex India) ?
AQ: I joined Flex India as a member. Subsequently, I started helping Manish Jethani (founder of Flex India group) manage the group. Mrinal Wadhwa joined us in this effort too. The three of us manage the online activities such as moderation, announcements and group pages updates.
A majority of time, we are also participating by answering and discussing various Flex/AIR/RIA related topics.
ST: Is the Flex India group actively involved in organizing developer meets and seminars? Is it a place where developers come looking for jobs?
AQ: Flex India group has members who also participate in various local/regional Adobe user-groups. These regional user-groups organize regular meetings. BangaloreFx (Adobe user-group for Bangalore) had recently organized a large scale event “initRIA” (http://www.initria.org/) , which was successful and we saw members flying from various parts of country to attend it. Credit goes to Mrinal Wadhwa and Saurabh Narula who manage BangaloreFx.
Flex India group is an online group which connects developers from all parts of country and is a place to discuss and plan any large scale event, not just technical topics. We see lots of job postings, which surely help developers pick up interesting career opportunities.
ST: India is a programming powerhouse in today’s time and age. There would easily be over a million Java prorammers there. How many of these do you think may be getting inclined to learn Flex and why?
AQ: Since the Flex 2.0 release, I have seen that a lot of Java developers, who have started developing Flex applications. I don’t have exact numbers, however, I am aware of various startups, which bootstrapped with Java developers and successfully delivered some good Flex based RIAs. Some large service companies like Wipro, Infosys, etc, also have Java developers working on Flex projects.
There are many reasons Java developers find it easy to develop Flex based RIAs, some of these are:-
1) ActionScript 3.0 is very close to Java, in terms of syntax and usages.
2) MXML, an easy to learn declarative language, is kind of close to JSP (with custom tags for layout and presentation)
3) Availability of good frameworks (Cairngorm, FlexUnit, etc), which are inspired from and based on Java/J2EE patterns/tools.
4) Availabilitf of many open-source Flex and Actionscript libraries
4) Flex applications easily integrate with Servlets, Struts and other J2EE stuff.
5) Various data-service options (HTTP, AMF - Action Message Format, Socket, etc) helps
6) Adobe data-service servers (LCD, BlazeDS, etc) are based on J2EE technology stack.BTW! Bruce Eckel, very well known in Java community, embraces Flex, which has certainly inspired/helped many Java developers to start thinking about Flex. James Ward, Flex Evangelist from Adobe, has been working closely with Java community to help them get started with Flex development.
ST: Are there enough employment options for these existing or budding Flex developers in India?
AQ: Yup! Flex developers are the most wanted :-)
ST: American offshoring is impacted by what Indian developers are adept with as much as Indian developers learn what the american firms desire.In this chicken and egg problem, where does the Indian developer community stand as far as RIA and AJAX go?
AQ: You are right, it’s a chicken-egg problem. Indian IT companies have been chasing the service model, which means, most of the time clients decide the technology. It continues to happen, we see developers being moved around various projects with different technological requirements. They end up learning various things but never get time to develop passion for any one. However, I am aware of many large service companies which have developed core-competency in various RIA technologies. Some of these companies are doing enterprise level Flex applications.
There are many developers who keep learning new things besides what they do at their day-job. Most of these developers are active members of Indian RIA community. I get to see and meet these developers in various events like Barcamp (), BlogCamp and DevCamp (http://devcamp.in/wiki/Main_Page).
We are seeing a lot of startups and entrepreneurs coming up, which is another reason RIA development is getting popular.
ST: Many smaller firms and startups are interested in leveraging the Flex talent pool in India. What would be your two cents on how they should go about hiring the right developers?
AQ: Adobe Flex is still a young technology compared to other technologies, so it’s hard to hire experts in a short time. It takes a lot of time to find and pursue an expert to join your startup. I suggest, hire smart guys (freshers or good programmers) and an expert, who can mentor/lead the team. Any one with good programming skills and web-application experience can pickup Flex/ActionScript and become a rockstar in a short time — the only requirement is to be open and enthusiastic to learn new things.
I hope, in couple of years, we would see a lots of Flex experts/rockstars in India.
ST: You are also an active supporter and contributor to open source software. What are your thoughts on Flex going open source?
AQ: I think, this is one of the best things that has happened to Flash Platform. Adobe has been thinking of open sourcing Flex since they acquired Macromedia.
It allows anyone and everyone to contribute to the development of Flex in ways that they choose. This would lead to a mature and better Flex SDK (tools and framework). There is already an open source flex/flash ecosystem, we know about osflash.org and many open-source flex/actionscript/flash libraries/projects on code.google.com.
Open source Flex would attract smart FOSS (Free Open Source Software) developers and lead to better tools, frameworks, libraries and so on. Any such thing is good for developers and Flash Platform.
ST: Do you think the common open source link between Java and Flex will bring any benefits to developers?
AQ: Adobe Flex development tools, part of Adobe Flex SDK, are written in Java. BlazeDS, another Adobe’s open-source project, is based on Java/J2EE. I think, we would soon start seeing some great integration and development tools which would allow better development/deployment work-flow.
We have seen how Java developers have been building various tools/servers (Red5) from scratch or by reverse engineering. Now with open-source Flex, things have gotten easier.
I can imagine end-less possibilities - open-source profiler, IDE, migration tools, integration tools, etc.
ST: Being a Java programmer yourself what are your thoughts on the Rich technologies that Adobe offers and the ones those Sun offers?
AQ: As far as I know, Sun’s offering doesn’t improve the designer-developer work-flow and just adds a new scripting language, that is not sufficient to create rich-user-experiences. If you look back, Applets were same except there was no JavaFX. Flash took off because of light-weight runtime, designers and developers worked closely to create rich user-experiences.
I think, Adobe’s offering includes various work-flows for RIA development, which leads to great user-experience. RIA is about Rich user-experience, which means compelling user-interfaces and interaction, there is no doubt that Adobe offers better tools to do that.
ST: Your love for Flex is evident but like all developers I am sure there are a few things that you don’t like about the technology. What are the top 3 things that you dislike about Flex and AIR?
AQ: There is nothing, I dislike. Both Adobe Flex and AIR are new, hence there is a room for improvement. I would like to see following:-
1) More Decoupling in Adobe Flex framework so that designers and developers can work on their pieces independently - better work-flow
2) Better support for Text (HTML and Bi-directional text) in Flash Player (Flex only).
3) Limited HTTP APIs in Flash Player - Need more support of HTTP verbs (PUT, DELETE, HEAD, etc)
4) Flex applications on mobiles and devices - a light-weight Flex framework and capable FlashLite and Mobile AIR runtime(s).Adobe has been very open to discuss and listen, most of these things are already part of Adobe’s plan.
That’s it for now!
Flex sucks big time!, Steve jobs is right, I will not install that bloated, bad designed flash plugin, it is like a trojan horse or virus on the PC. Always I hated flash.
Flex is new in India. I think the only way it can lead Java is by adding some useful light weight development software. To develop in a desktop with fully loaded hardware it takes a long time to load. I am going impatient and most of my Flex development takes a longer time.
We hope to see a nice and lighter version like the jaascript to come and help us :-)
@sidewinder: Are you sure you do not have the Flash plugin? Wow in the present world that's equivalent to not having an email account hehe ;-)
@Venkateswara VP: I hope you are referring to Flex builder not Actionscript? Well you could always use the Flex SDK(available for free) and use your favorite lightweight text editor(notepad?) to develop applications. There's no need to wait :-)
Hey Shashank,
Excellent interview .. Abdul has described the state of the Flex community in India very well.
Being equally passionate about both Java and Flex, I have to express some concern over the title of your post. In my opinion Java has no reason to watch out for Flex ... both of them play really well together.
Lets look at what Java is used for today, home many web applications use a Java front end ?? very few .. Java is used on the server side of web apps, most front ends are rendered in HTML/Javascript .. Flex/Flash is a good option for building highly interactive front ends for the web, your sever side remains the same Java based backend that you always had, and there are some excellent ways to communicate between your flex front end your java back end.
This will change slightly when Java's new web development model kicks in later this year and the new plugins start gaining adoption, but till then Flex is the best option to build rich UIs for the web and java is not used for that today.
As for desktop applications, even though AIR allows you to build desktop applications in Flex, AIR is no way a competitor of Java, at least not in version 1, there are so many things an AIR app cannot do .. create threads, create new processes, interact with other processes, interact with system hardware, make system calls etc. etc. .... AIR as of now is just a way for web developers to give their power users some extra abilities, it can also be used to build some simple applications that don't need the things I mentioned above .... but Java still rules on the desktop.
If your argument is that Flex and Java are competing for a talent pool ... that may be true a little bit but in general people who build UIs and people who build servers tend to different so the problem here is not very big.
So in my opinion Flex and Java are best buds :) ... throw in BlazeDS and you have one hell of a team.
@sidewinder: all I can say is that your opinion is naive at best, Flex/Flash enable such extraordinary applications like http://buzzoword.com ... the whole world is moving on to realize the potential of the flash platform, maybe you should too.
@Venkateswara VP: I think you are using FlexBuilder 2 .. it was kinda slow although there are ways to improve that .. but FlexBuilder 3 has seen a major improvement, try it out.. you could always use your favorite text editor to build Flex and now with the SDK (including the compiler) going opensource, we will start to see many other IDEs for Flex, I know IntelliJ is already working on one.
@all: Lets not kid ourselves and assume that the Flash player is the be all and end all VM for web applications. Also, flex application development has its own set of limitations and problems like almost any other technology involved in any serious business. However, there are many advantages of Flex (and the Flash platform) over its alternatives and its evolving in a promising manner. Its a great choice in today's time and age, when end user computing resources are becoming abundant and need for greater interactivity (beyond read-only texts) is becoming increasingly important.
@Mrinal: I am glad you thought the interview with Abdul was useful.
I can understand your concern about the title and in response I have modified it a bit to say "Java UI watch out" instead of "Java watch out". However, I would like you to consider the title in light of the larger context of web application UIs today. The web UIs are still dominated by 3 major technologies -- Java, ASP(and its cousins) and PHP. I am not counting HTML, JavaScript and the SGML markup languages separately, because they come with each of these three options that I have listed. Everything else counted in terms of dollars spent or serious applications built can easily be classified as others. Unfortunately most technology spending is done at large corporates, who when it comes to technologies don't necessarily like to live on the bleeding edge.
Rewind and go back to the late 90s when the web application world started believing that a thin client served off the server was the hip way to go. Its not like you couldn't build VM based rich web apps then. Back then we built fairly complicated banking and procurement applications using Applets alone. Its just that the time was not right! Bandwidth was low, computing resources weren't as abundant as today (a PC with 256 MB RAM used to be the high end -- it wouldn't sell for junk in today's time and age). On top of it Applets had its shares of problems and server centric UIs were at the forefront of fashion.
Back to today and the near future --
Ajax and RIA has started gaining adoption and begun to compete with some of these technologies. Flex in particular is getting popular at places where they use PHP, Java or ColdFusion. Now which area, apart from PHP, is Flex going to erode into the most? Isn't it Java server centric UIs? The question is in the desire to go RIA will Java server centric UI developers (those who program in Servlets, JSP, JSF and the numerous frameworks like Struts, Spring MVC and Web Flow, Seam and the many others that could take me upto a whole week to list :)) go to Flex or Ajax (with one of these server centric options) or Swing/Applets or the Hype (popularly known as JavaFX)? The answer is unknown but there are few things one can guess. The hype is out till it becomes real and Swing/Applets is the bad guy who despite all its good work is tarnished beyond repair as far as web applications go. (Interestingly there are still many web applications that are built on Swing/Applets -- even some of those which were kick started a few months back). So the choice in the near term is Ajax (with server centric framework) or Flex? Now if Flex sees adoption -- who is losing? Also, as Flex becomes popular will the same companies and developers who have just come onboard be willing to switch gears in favour of JavaFX in a few months?
Now as far as BlazeDS goes -- yes it makes Flex easy to be used within the Java EE (or servlet container) world and that is the intention! Flex isn't playing in the server space at all. On the contrary it would like to go with a dominant player in the server side and that is Java. So when you get to comparing the apples alone -- i.e. UI (and leave the oranges out -- the server) you may be left to choose between Flex or Java based UI (+js+ ....) with a Java server for now.
As far as AIR goes, lets not even bring that topic up! AIR is not even trying to play in the mainstream desktop UI market for now. I presented an eSeminar for Adobe on AIR last month and I was amazed to find so many people being unclear about what its purpose is.
A very nice interview...Flex rocks!!!
good..
Nah, I better use Java applets or wait for JavaFX, JavaFX looks more promising and it's integrated with the Java platform very well plus million's of users already have JRE installed in one form or another as flash. About tools dont tell me that Flex builder is the best tool for a designer, it looks as any IDE as Eclipse(it is based in eclipse i know), I'm sure SUN and the Eclipse fundation will come with great plugins to develop JavaFX.
And for the record I don't trust Adobe it is a company for graphic designers not for Software engineer's as SUN.
Flex and other Adobe products are not open sourced.Lets not follow this 'web desginer' tools.Tools are not important.But technology is.Adobe does the same.It hires people based on C++/Data structures knowledge and asks rest of the world to use their products.
@Jayaprakash:
Flex and other Adobe products are not open sourced.
>> This statement is not accurate. Flex is open sourced and gateways like BlazeDS that work with Flex are also open sourced. Maybe you are not aware of this. Please look at http://opensource.adobe.com
Also, being open source or not does not make any technology or tool good or bad.
>>Lets not follow this 'web desginer' tools.
I have seen this sentiment among a lot of developers. However, let me warn you that as programming continues to evolve this divide is going to get blurred sooner, rather than later. Its not Adobe alone. Microsoft, Sun and many others are on this path of supporting both these disciplines :)
>>Tools are not important.But technology is.
Do you want to get rid of your cooking gas because the flintstone can also build a fire? Why are you using this blogging or emailing program or the browser for that matter -- these are all tools. Maybe you want to create these of your own :) I don't think anybody is going to reward you reinvent the wheel at this step of our evolution. Its good to understand what's happening under the hood but shunning everything in the name of tools is not wise by any means.
>>Adobe does the same.It hires people based on C++/Data structures knowledge and asks rest of the world to use their products.
Adobe builds products that help application developers leverage it to gain productivity and get their job done. They are not the only ones who do that but pretty much every other product company does this. They also eat there own dog food -- have you seen Breeze or Buzzword by any chance? Do you want to write the compiler and the virtual machine or do you want to write the application code? You may be aware that most dynamic languages including Perl, Python and Ruby are built on C. Should these go out the door and everybody start using C for everything?
I have been reading various comments and wondering, should I be responding here :-)
I just want to say, technologies are like tools in the hands of an artist, sometimes these tools make things easier and sometimes require more effort.
I would focus on the problems at hand and look around various technologies which can help me provide the best user-experience to users. At the same time, I also need to think about business - how much time I am gonna spend to build an app? Which technology would help me doing it faster? Is it ok to go for Flex/Flash or AJAX, why?
All these matter while making decision. AJAX is great because it doesn't require extra plug-in or runtime, runs natively within browser. Flex/Flash are great they can do things, or have been doing, which AJAX (=DHTML) in browser can not do as of today.
Java applets/swing-apps can be great for some use-cases, probably all the case, I don't know. It's relative - if I have team of great Java guys, I can push the limits using Java..
Decision is generally in the hands of developers, most of the time, we have to decide what kind of user-experience we want to provide, we have to take care of business requirements?
Let's not be religious about any one technology? Let's build great applications, whatever [technology] it takes.
Having said that, as of today, I find Adobe Flash runtimes (player, air, etc) allow me to do things hence I use them. Tomorrow, browser would support most of these (audio/video, crossdomain data, etc) then I would be using AJAX (if that would be the way then) or anything else.
In any case, end user doesn't have to think about technology while using it. It's our responsibility to blur that line and make the experience seamless.
I did a small mashup couple of weeks back, where I realized that line was blurred, take a look at it and try to figure it, I would post another comment to describe that line:
http://abdulqabiz.com/files/ylive_mashup/multi_window.html
Thanks
-abdul
Excellent article!! Interesting interview too. Liked it very much.
Will try to implement what I learned from here, right away.
Thanks.
Hi Guys,
I think Abdul is absolutely right about adobe flex. It is going to change the way we develop applications in future. I want it to enter into mobile apps as well.
Rajendra Tammana
Hi all,
Its a nice interview. Thanks to Shashank and Abdul as well for sharing their valuable knowledge to us.
Yah, abdul is absolutely right. Please don't be religious about any one technology. I am a java developer and working in the Mixercast since past 2 years or more. I have a great experience of develop our product with Abdul, where we are successfully using Flash-Action script as Front end and java in back. Its not Action script 3 or Flex though , but we are working on it.
I don't have much experience in java swing or applet but its my personal opinion that Flash-Flex is far ahead of Java as far as UI and front end is concern.
So, I think its always be a good idea to bind both the technologies and use their best features and develop great application , rather than be rigid on any personal issue.