• Aanval 5.2 development and testing
• Aanval general support
• Dedicated time for several small Tactical FLEX clients
• Picked up two more professional services clients (Flex & AIR)
• Development and testing on liveSnort (new name not announced quite yet)
• Development on another personal AIR project (not announcing it yet)
• A few external information security / vulnerability assessments

… and this doesn’t take into account anything relating to personal life / family! It was a rough month, but still 100% enjoyable.

August is looking much more routine… Aanval 5.2 is to be released here very shortly, only a single audit, and the new consulting work picked up so far this month combined with last months projects creates a nice rhythm.

~moses

Half empty. Time for a refill!

Within the last 10 days or so, I’ve been able to wrap up several small Adobe Flex and AIR projects and now have some availability for some interesting and / or unique opportunities. Let’s hear em’.

Regarding the Flex / AIR sector in general; I am still absolutely amazed at the shear number of Flex and AIR projects that are in search of developers for both consulting and long-term contract work. Although I pass on dedicated contract work, any new or experienced Flex developer has a near unending supply of opportunity to harvest from it seems.

Unique, technical or interesting projects of any type are of course a preference, however I also enjoy cranking out small or quick one-off solutions.

As I said above, let’s hear what you got!

~moses

For quite some time now; the phone and email box have been very much alive and thriving with requests for Flex and AIR consulting engagements.

I am not at all surprised, as the technology speaks for itself — but clearly there is professional service work to be done.

More and more as Flex emerges from the depths of its niche following, organizations are becoming more aware of the impact it may have on their core business, employees, customers and clients.

An important task for those of us who promote the use of Flex (when it fits), is to ensure that our clients understand the full range of its benefits.

Rich Internet Applications (“RIA”)’s, Mashups, and Web Services are only a small selection of the capabilities. One of the strengths that I see clients most interested in, is the core business components of Flex such as the datagrid and wide selection of other listing components.

Even the viewstack, strange enough seems to be of large interest. Not to mention desktop applications by way of AIR.

Recently a colleague of mine called me a princess, yes a princess for refusing to build new projects in older languages. Being so finicky may make me a princess, but I prefer to spend my hours developing in a cutting edge language, creating state of the art applications any day.

We need to understand that Cairngorm is not a solution to a problem. It is an architecture to force stricter standards compliance with the MVC concept.

MVC (“Model-View-Controller”) is a concept, and we as developers are free to adhere as closely or as loose to this concept as we like.

Each project will have different requirements for the structure that is used to follow an MVC concept and this is where true developers shine.

Common problems or pitfalls in current languages are solved by the use of well known design patterns, not architectures. Design patterns hand a solution to a developer and allow him/her to integrate it in the most appropriate fashion.

Architectures such as Cairngorm create many layers of communication that for some projects may be perfect but for others just too much. They are heavy, commonly break development standards such as encapsulation and programming to interface as well as create vast amounts of linked classes that are near impossible to re-factor in large projects.

Cairngorm has its benefits if used sparingly, but all too often there is an overkill of usage, in which adding one simple feature can cause an avalanche of class modifications.

I find that I become easily annoyed with the half dozen layers, retyping the same code over and over again in each class component and begin to find myself breaking out of Cairngorm standards after only a few hours of development.

Creating a common standard is a good thing, but isn’t that what the language is in itself? A developer is taught standards, best practices and theories for design and some will expand upon these basics and become experts, while others will become lazy and produce poor results.

Let’s all not be punished by those with poor coding practices and be forced to use these training wheels.

… and don’t get me started on rails.

Specialized Rich Internet Application Development – Adobe Flex, Adobe Air, PHP, MySQL / SQLite, Linux, Unix

More than 10+ years of development in desktop, Internet centric and network based applications.

Below is a small selection of expertise:

Objective-C / 2.0, C/C++, AS3, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript, XML, HTML, TCP/IP, SQL, Linux, Unix, Windows, OS X

Visit the Tactical FLEX website and call for research and / or professional services inquiries.

http://www.tacticalflex.com/

Tags: Flex Developer, Flex Consulting, Flex Professional Services, Flex Outsourcing