An Interview with Dave Wolf of Cynergy Systems

 
Aug 18, 2006

by Judith Dinowitz

At the Real World Flex Seminar on Monday, August 14th, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dave Wolf of Cynergy Systems (http://www.cynergysystems.com) for a unique perspective on Rich Internet Application development, Flex and ColdFusion. I have transcribed that interview, but you can also listen to the full podcast as well.

Judith: Could you please tell us a little bit about your company?
Dave: Cynergy Systems is a software development house that specializes in developing Rich Internet Applications. We've been in business for 10 years. We come from a strong business applications development background. Our clients were looking to bring those applications to the web and were disappointed by how primitive the web could be. We've focused for the last five or six years out of ten years on making those applications richer and richer. For the last two years, we've been developing Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex. We're based in Washington DC, with offices in Houston, Grand Rapids and San Diego.
Judith: So you started doing HTML applications 10 years ago?
Dave: Plain server side. Like Applications, CRM, ERPs, Inventory ... Stuff that ran businesses. Then folks wanted to go to the web. Then they wanted to make their web apps look as good as their client-server apps looked. It's tough with HTML and the web today.
Judith: So you started doing Flash applications 5 years ago?
Dave: No, we started doing RIAs in general, which meant DHTML and what people are now calling AJAX.
Judith: You make the point that DHTML is today's AJAX.
Dave Yeah. You'll hear people say, I'm going to do that in AJAX. Strictly speaking, AJAX is nothing more than asynchronously pulling data down from a server in some partial page-refresh. So they go into what the page looks like. And that, which is kind of the hidden secret in the closet, is DHTML.

If you changed that question and said, Would you want to do this in AJAX, they'd say AJAX is great. If you said, Would you want to do that in DHTML, they'd say, No way. That's the four-letter 'D' word. I tried that already.
Judith: (laughs) They don't know that it's a five-letter D-word.
Dave: Five-letter "D" word. Yeah, you're right. (Laughs)
Judith: So they don't know that they're using DHTML when they're doing AJAX.
Dave: No. AJAX, for the most part, is DHTML with a costume on, and people don't think of it that way.
Judith: Do most of your clients opt for Flex or AJAX? Do you do AJAX too?
Dave: We do AJAX, DHTML, pure HTML development. I would say the majority today seem more interested in Flex and Flash. Generally, folks' only objection to the Flash requirement is the player. Some people are saying, Look, I just can't require people to have a player. I would say that less than 10 percent are like that.
Judith: Less than 10 percent have this objection. So most people have no problem with the player.
Dave: Most people have no problem with the player. The player's everywhere.
Judith: That's good. So you came to this Flex seminar and you were a sponsor? Did Sys-Con approach you on this?
Dave: We had heard it was going on and we knew Sys-Con was looking for sponsors. We've been doing so much work in Flex over the last two years that it became the obvious choice.
Judith: What's the biggest obstacle for the spread of Flex? What do you see as an obstacle or a challenge that Adobe has to overcome?
Dave: The history and baggage that people think that Flash is for banner ads, and that you don't write real applications in Flash. That the player can't handle large data and it was designed for banner ads. I think that blocker is people seeing real apps. That's a lot of what we wanted to do today - to show real businesses running real, large applications. Take Over-C, the application we showed here today. The integration points are incredible: Service-based architecture, talking to Nokia devices, SMS, IVR, enterprise message bus, Java/J2EE, strict security... It's a serious enterprise class application built on what's effectively a Flash player.

That was [what] we demoed -- the SecurityGuard application.
Judith: Do you have demos on your website?
Dave: If you go to the main home page (http://www.cynergysystems.com/), there's a video you can watch that states the business case [the client is] trying to solve and gives you a glimpse of the application and how it's being used.
Judith: So curiously, in the RIAs that you do, do you ever use ColdFusion?
Dave: We do. Usually because it uses a ColdFusion backend or the client we're working with has ColdFusion experience, or something along those lines.
Judith: What are the attitudes of people towards ColdFusion? You deal with enterprise clients...
Dave: It depends whether they're using it already, like the folks who have been using it, and have standardized on ColdFusion for a long time for the production apps and the folks that they have in-house. Whereas a lot of clients don't have any opinion whatsoever or any experience with it. If they're a ColdFusion shop, we'll be glad to use ColdFusion for the backend.
Judith: Do you have ColdFusion people on staff, as well as Flash and Flex?
Dave: We do. As well as Java, J2EE and data modelers? Oh, and all the parts of it. Even if you're using ColdFusion, what if you had to talk to an enterprise message bus? Or what if you had to integrate with a third-party server that's Java-based? You have to integrate all this stuff together and make it work.
Judith: For people who are interested in learning Flex, especially people who are in ColdFusion already, what advice would you give? How do you learn Flex?
Dave: I think the biggest challenge for the ColdFusion folks in general, and actually this [is true of] the Flash folks as well, is understanding and learning object-oriented programming. There's nothing specific to Flex/Flash and what Adobe's doing, but OOP is the basis for most of the development that occurs there. Adobe's Devnet has a lot of great tutorials on learning Flex. There's a bunch of great discussion groups like Flexcoders on Yahoo, and others. The one thing that's absolutely true about Flex, which is an interesting analog back to the Java/J2EE days, is the level of community. Between Flexcoders, Devnet, user groups, there's a lot of people to rely on.
Judith: Just like in ColdFusion.
Dave: Just like in ColdFusion.
Judith: Not to promote my own stuff, but we actually have an object-oriented programming and frameworks issue coming out at MAX. That's the second issue of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update journal. So maybe issues like that, or articles, are the way to go...
Dave: The way I look at it is a lot of programming is written or spoken language. Have you ever noticed if someone knows two languages, they often know eight? The reason is that they've learned about languages. If it's a romance language, they'll know how a romance language works... They understand the core structure of the language; the rest is syntax.

The same thing is true of Object-Oriented Programming. Once you know and understand Object-Oriented Programming, whether you're writing Java or JavaScript or ActionScript, or Perl, or whatever new Object-Oriented language you pick up — you just have to learn the syntax.
Judith: So you've got to learn the basics of OOP, which really would mean trying to write an Object-Oriented program, and experimenting with that... Then would you say ActionScript is the thing to learn?
Dave: Yes, you're going to be using ActionScript and MXML. The interesting thing about ColdFusion folks is that unlike a more traditional Flash person, they understand databases and transactions and SQL. If there were two things to focus on, it's Object-Oriented Programming and SQL. You're writing applications. Applications talk to data. We get data from SQL.
Judith: So you've already got the SQL.
Dave: Right.
Judith: You've already got the knowledge of the database.
Dave: Yes.
Judith: So all you really need is the Object-Oriented programming and to learn how to use ActionScript?
Dave: And to learn how to use the syntax, and that's what help files are for.
Judith: And if you know JavaScript, how far are you from ActionScript?
Dave: That will be a big leg up. They're actually very similar; they're both related to something called ECMAScript, which is the standardized version of the two.
Judith: So it sounds like ColdFusion developers really do have a large advantage over people coming from the design side.
Dave: It is much easier to learn how to develop a RIA and how to develop a user experience than it is to learn databases and SQL and set theory, and all the things — scalability, maintainability, performance — that we learned writing Enterprise apps. So I think that's why you'll see folks coming from the ColdFusion camp, the J2EE camp, and the Microsoft camp to learn that aspect. It's much easier for them than for the pure design folks to come in and learn that stuff.
Judith: Is it much easier for Java developers — perhaps easier than it is for ColdFusion people? Java developers think more in the Enterprise...
Dave: They think more in the enterprise, and they may be more used to the Enterprise. The difficulty the Java folks have is that they look at the user experience — the interface — as a second-class citizen. They are so entrenched in and enamored of the APIs and elegance that the user experience is a second-class citizen. That's the Achilles heel that the Java people carry around.
Judith: Well, I guess everyone has some Achilles heel, but the idea is to persevere and get past it?
Dave: Yes, absolutely.
Judith: Well, thank you very much, and I look forward to seeing you at the next Real World Flex Seminar.
Dave: Or MAX, whatever's next.
Judith: Or MAX.
Judith Dinowitz is Editor-in-Chief of Fusion Authority, the House of Fusion Technical Magazine. She is well-known as the CFEditor, having worked on many articles and books for other publications.
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