Mindless Mind©

Last week I delivered a week long training on Adobe Flex 3 (yet again). Apart from the technologies - Adobe Flex and ActionScript - the training aimed to focus on Web 2.0 and RIA.

Web 2.0 and RIA, today, are more or less established philosophies.

However, what I think is that the world is heavily divided on which framework / toolkit to go for. Most of the web revolves around JavaScript & Ajax and/or Flash & ActionScript. Slowly and gradually, Silverlight & WPF/JavaScript seems to be making inroad on the development front - not quite sure how fast.

So, I thought let me try to compile a few frameworks (partial list inspired from the one at Wikipedia):

• Dojo Toolkit available at http://dojotoolkit.org. It is supported by IBM, Sun, AOL, BEA and SitePen among others.
• Google Web Toolkit available at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit. It is supported and developed by Google.
• ExtJs available at http://extjs.com. Infact, the team married GWT and created GWT-Ext available at http://gwt-ext.com.
• Yahoo! UI available at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui. It is supported by Yahoo!
• jQuery available at http://www.jquery.com.
• Adobe Flex at http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.
• Microsoft Silverlight available at http://www.silverlight.net.

Barring Adobe Flex, all other frameworks use a common technology - JavaScript and Ajax.

However, some toolkits like Dojo uses / used Flash for offline storage. Some of them are moving to Google Gears for offline store.

And at the moment, I have to rush to the market… will build on this in my subsequent articles.

Today, I will try to answer a question, “Why an individual, working directly with end client, cannot survive long in training ?”

Well, this question is based on my perspective - “An indiviual cannot go long”.

Or, as we call in Hindi, “Akela Chana Bhaand Naheen Phod Sakta (अकेला चना भाड़ नहीं फोड़ सकता)”

Given below are my justifications, based on my experiences.

Let’s try to look at the activities in a smart trainer’s life:

• Know / Learn, in depth, about the subject to provide training on.
• Have / Get practical knowledge to be able to provide effective training. Otherwise, it remains a pure theoretical “teaching” rather than practical “training”
• Prepare effective case-studies, that more real-world than theoretical. The training should comprise of some “best practices”.
• Be prepared to answer queries from the “related areas” rather than only “the subject / topics”
• At times, sit with the team undergoing training to analyze their project and provide best approach for implementing solution to business problem.
  Trainer should understand the business problem as opposed to only technical problem since unless a technology solves the business / human problem, the technology or solution is of no use!
• Ensure that he is on the cutting edge of the technology, lest he becomes obsolete.
• Prepare the literate to be handed over to the audience.

However, if the trainer is an individual he will need to, additionally, work on the following:

• Negotiate price.
• Check his availability and giving immediate commitment, which he / she may not want to do.
• At times, run around places at the client premises to get his payments. The payment cycle can be from around 10 days to 60 days.
  Which means that the trainer cannot work with the companies where the payment cycle is long lest he has enough buffer with himself.
• Look at taxes, especially TDS
• Ensure that the tax is not deducted for reimbursements. Ensure that Debit Note is taken care of appropriately.
• Participate in regular “vendor meets” organized by the clients.
• Prepare the literate to be handed over to the audience. Here, the physical delivery - may be a book or a CD/DVD etc.

Now, my simple question - “How much of this can an individual do effectively ?”

Once he starts running around to collect the payments, his precious training time is gone. Also, once he receives the payment after running around, he may be simply too tired physically to check up with the latest in the world.

At least two people are required. One to focus on the first set of activities, and the other for the latter set.

That’s how we - Yashwanth C and Gaurav Vaish - started Edujini.
I’ll find time to write something on the “history of Edujini” later on…

Just yesterday I posted about “thinking” to create the Java API to work for Dojo on GWT. And today, it’s kind of official.

Edujini Labs is going to sponsor this project. Check the posting on Eduzine here.

In fact, a mail to the Dojo Team has already been sent about the intimation of the same.

Have a look at the “Hello, World!” on the early-stage DWT.

My real love for GWT started only a couple of days ago… and it prompted me to get started with Dojo on GWT.

I have, so far, written a couple of core-classes in Java mainly to abstract out the interaction with JavaScriptObject.

My next target was to directly jump on to dijit, and start creating the UI. And then I realized that it uses mixins. And now I am left wondering what’s the best way to handle mixins.

For the new comers, JavaScript allows single inheritance but Dojo (and other libraries) make use of mixins to pseudo-inherit methods and properties from other objects by copying them to the sub-object.

In Java, this can be achieved only by making use of interfaces. The other possibility is to introduce a class between the parent and the child class that encapsulates the mixin objects.

I think the latter is a better approach. Simply expose the object or may be create delegate methods.

Let me think over it… what’s the best way to marry Java and JavaScript.

On Monday, I talked about the training on Visual Studio Team System 2005 Extensibility and I said that I would probably post across a sample piece of code.

But I did not get time.

What more interests me is the web. And there is Google Web Toolkit to help us write structured JavaScript in Java. Sounds great, isn’t it?

So, what I did was to quickly compile a couple of articles on GWT and post at Eduzine™ here and here.

Enjoy working with Google Web Toolkit, JavaScript and Ajax!