How to Build On-Demand Business Apps Using force.com and Flex - part 2

flex is using a virtual machine called "Mozilla Tamarin"

there is a free version of software for building flex applications

Air:
includes flash player, webkit, air api's (drag and drop, network detection, etc)
works on any platform the same way

demo: parleys.com
You can download these videos to an air desktop version, and watch them without an internet connection

How Flex works
mxml and ActionScript
mxml is optional, can be done all in actionScript
complies into a swf file, that gets put into a web server or air.

pointing out a toolkit adobe made to allow use of force.com (using the partner wsdl)

How to Build On-Demand Business Apps Using force.com and Flex

salesforce.com and adobe.com representatives

so far just a pitch for using salesforce.com. Nothing about how to build apps... hopefully will get something there soon

session - "it's the enterprise, Stupid"

nextaweb

talking about "desktop in a browser" experience.
Being able to have desktop performance in a web application
large and real time data throughput
Creating "heads down", keyboard only navigation

basically this guy is doing a lot of self promotion for his company which is unfortunate.

"things that will make a developer successful"

• it's still a web app
• know your app reqs
• pick the right toolkit/platform/framework
• don't over do it
• don't under estimate JS
• performace will be a problem
• start with services

using google apis for Ajax

going to talk about the maps, API's, gadgets, openSocial, appEngine

code.google.com will get you some visual ideas of the information mentioned below
the slides will be available on the sys-con site and slideshare

new google map features

• flash based maps
• static image maps
• panoramio and wikipedia layers
• walking directions
• ip based client location

Ajax API's

• Ajax Search, Ajax Feed, Ajax Language
• Ajax search can do multiple search types, video, text, audio, news, etc
• Ajax Feed api - allows you to load, find, and lookup rss feeds, and it makes this into an api that you can do whatever you would like.
• Ajax Language API - can detect your language of the page, and translate any language you want

These API's can be used on their own to create a new application, this doesn't need to just be things to add to a current page

Showing an example of a google blog application...

Javascript: the good parts - CTO Yahoo - part 3

Note: computer is about dead and all outlets are being used in this session... if computer dies, I will be back with a charged computer after lunch at 2pm pacific

showing code examples now on better ways to not create global variables

his suggestion is that this is a small language, easy to learn and is the most used programming language in the world... it is worth the struggle to learn it even though everyone seems resistant to want to learn it.

Javascript: the good parts - CTO Yahoo - part 2

note, try not to ever use ==, use === instead

value == null should be value === undefined

Good features

• Obj can inherir from other objs
• Func can be members of objs
• for..in statement

every for..in statement needs to have an if statement to filter the items down

binary floating point numbers are not accurate, so if dealing with money for instance, take a dollar, x 100, do the math needed, then /100 to get your answer

Good parts:

• lambda: functions as first class values, creating functions, passing them into other functions, etc...
• Dynamic Objects
• Loose Typing - don't have to set a type for every parameter (most languages use strong type)

Javascript: the good parts - CTO Yahoo

The worlds most misunderstood programming language

complaints:

"JS is not a language that I know"
"The browser programming experience is awful"
"It's not fast enough"
"the language is just a pile of mistakes"

Under the surface, JS actually has good parts

Java as a client language was a disaster but JS is still being used

Bad Parts:

• global variables
• + adds and concatenates
• Semicolon insertion
• typeof
• with and eval
• phony arrays
• == and !=
• false, null, undefined, NaN