Wednesday, May 16, 2007 11:01 PM | rahel luethy | 3 comment(s)
in the meantime, i had the opportunity to spend our scrum team's gold card on getting to know flex a bit better, and i must say that i like it quite a lot. flash stuff just looks very beautiful, and flex seems to be a framework with a well defined responsibility (the presentation layer), a nice set of widgets with excellent default behavior, and an easy to use API. consequently, with just a few lines of code you get quite impressive results.
unfortunately, this is not really the case for java. as much as i like java, the overhead of user interface development always turns out to be bigger than you would hope for, and this is already true for very basic functionality (let alone turning your grey frames into eye candy). the same is probably true for java based web-apps (we recently had to task out a struts-based web application: the numbers turned out impressively high and i am pretty sure that we haven't planned for any css-wizzardy).
i am thus very excited that sun's hopping onto the ria bandwagon as well: i've just watched their Java FX announcement webcast, and i wish i had another gold card to spend soon.
5:07 AM | Benjamin Rosenbaum said...
what the heck is a scrum team gold card? You are making me feel like an old fogey!
9:47 AM | rahel luethy said...
the gold card is just a normal scrum index card that allows a developer to spend a day investigating a topic of their choice. the topic doesn't need to have any business benefits.
in our team, we have one gold card per sprint and we rotate it between developers. the results of the gold card are then presented to the team in a pizza lunch, usually in the form of a talk with some live code demo.
it's probably the one scrum "discipline" that is easiest adopt (just in case you need some "agility" to polish up your dodo style ;-))
9:50 AM | kyb said...
We have two days self directed R&D per month, that you can take with one days notice to the iteration lead. I guess it's similar to that?
When it comes to web development, it's actually amazing how much you can get done quickly. There are a lot of quirks, so it's good to have people who are walking hashmaps of browser quirks nearby to chat to.
Part of what makes web development fun is how quick and easy it is to put together a really pleasant user interface compared to java.
I think it's funny that java has essentially failed in the niche that it was aimed at, but succeeded on the serverside. It's a big shame in a lot of ways. Decent browser plugins and JavaFx are about 10 years late.
