An Interview with Shashank Tiwari on Flex Camp Wall Street

Why do a Flex Camp on Wall Street?

Wall St. is a huge user base as far as any technology is concerned. In the recent past, Adobe Flex has seen a healthy rate of adoption in banks and financial institutions, in New York at large and in Wall St. in particular.

Two of the prime movers behind this Flex camp effort – us at Saven and our friends at Farata – have been doing a lot of work with the banks. We've seen a lot of excitement about this technology with our prospects and clients. To our knowledge, a large number of banks and financial institutions are beginning to use Flex, at least in one application. We thought it was a good idea to set up a Flex Camp where they could get to meet a few practitioners of this technology and to understand the technology better.

How did you get involved with Flex?

There's an interesting small history behind it. More than a couple of years back, we were pretty much among the first few people here in New York doing enterprise Flex. This happened quite by chance! Some people from Farata and from Saven were advising a large bank. The bank was excited about Ajax and wanted to build a couple of enterprise applications using the technology. What they were not sure about was which toolkit or library to use! After much analysis and deliberation we chose Flex (then the newly released version 1.5) as the RIA technology. The bank showed both courage and commitment and we ended up building a business-critical application using the technology.

Ever since, I have enjoyed the benefits of using this technology. As a company, we have been evangelizing Flex. We have contributed on the available open-source projects and spoken at conferences and events.

Are there many Flex open-source projects?

Plenty. Starting with some being championed by Adobe themselves, there are plenty of them on Google Code. I am a member of a few projects, including AS3CoreLib and Fireclay (both on Google Code). I know our friends at Digital Primates, who are the other partners who have helped made Flex Camp Wall Street possible, have contributed to a bunch of open source projects (again all on Google Code), including dpHibernate, which has an interesting hook from Flex to the Hibernate framework, and dpUnit, an alternative to FlexUnit. Farata has a bunch of open-source projects as well, including Clear Data Builder, which is hosted on Sourceforge and MyFlex.org.

What will people coming to the Flex Camp Wall Street get that they would not get from reading blogs and magazines?

Flex Camp Wall Street has a very focused agenda, which is to provide a single platform where anybody and everybody who's associated with financial applications can come and see what's possible today with this technology (i.e. RIA with Flex/AIR). This event will help them understand how they could use it within their organizations. It will help provide ideas on how they could use it to their best advantage. That's why we called this Flex Camp Wall Street, not Flex Camp NY.

If you go to the Flex Camp Wall Street website, you'll see a page with session descriptions. There you'll find that every single presentation is about something relevant and important to the financial technology sector. Because the event is trying to take a more focused approach on one industry, it also includes a few advanced topics. We felt that there is already a lot out there focused on 101 – on beginning Flex.

We think our event is complementary to what other conference organizers do in the city. Ajaxworld does a good job of presenting the spectrum of technologies out there in the RIA space. Apart from that, there are user groups – NYFlex, the NYCFUG, NYJavaSIG – who have all done one or more events related to RIA, and in particular Flex. These user groups are vibrant and well-attended organizations that continue to provide a regular set of sessions on this technology and more.

Where do you see Flex going?

I see that there are two broad directions we are moving with this technology. First, the technology is evolving steadily into an enterprise-grade technology. It's no longer a small, UI-centric tool. It's a big suite that can be used in enterprise-focused applications. Second, it's becoming part of a whole; that whole need not be only Adobe-based technologies. There will be more and more of these hooks out there that will help it integrate with newer systems and diverse platforms.

What would you recommend for people who are getting into Flex – besides coming to Flex Camp Wall Street?

The best thing is that there's plenty of documentation out there for free. Most of the tools that you need to build flex apps are open source and freely available. Download the tools, get the trial version of FlexBuilder3. Go through the livedocs. Read the tons of articles out there on Flex and start writing some code , right away.

Do you see a lot of people getting into Flex from ColdFusion? How many do you think get into Flex from ColdFusion vs. from PHP, or from ASP?

In January of last year, I put out a blog post, where I said that one in every 10 Java developers will be developing in Flex. I was basing this on a statement that Adobe made. About two years back, Adobe was claiming that they would soon have a million odd developers developing in Flex. If that 1,000,000 is going to be built of people who are already building in one platform or the other, this is going to include the Java developers because the server-side application programs supported by Adobe are on the Java platform and Adobe has spent substantial energy getting the Java community on board.

Where will the rest of these developers come from? Well, you have people who are already using other Adobe languages, like ColdFusion and Flash. Then you have the PHP community, where Adobe has actively spent time evangelizing. The only community they are not so hot on is the Microsoft developers. (They are not really leaving them out; these developers are just not Adobe's target audience.)

Looking at things now, it may be safe to say that it's going to be almost 50/50, with half of that one million coming from the Flash and ColdFusion users, and the other half coming from the set of Java and PHP developers interested in learning Flex. A lot of the Flash platform users are designers, and they aren't interested in learning programming. For ColdFusion developers, it's an incremental skill addition, which they will want to do.

Jeff Houser, one of the people behind The Flex show, and Mike Nimer, who is presenting at Flex Camp Wall Street and is a senior Digital Primates consultant, are both well established ColdFusion developers. Both of them are believers in using Flex and ColdFusion together. I know there are many more like them who are enthusiastically using ColdFusion and Flex together. Ben Forta and many of the leaders in the community are all talking Flex today. So it makes sense that ColdFusion developers would want to learn Flex. Its makes a logical progression.

Well, then perhaps some of those ColdFusion developers will want to come down to Flex Camp Wall Street. I understand there are a few seats left?

That's right, Judith. About 15 seats left...

Great, I'll tell them to register! Thanks so much, Shashank. This has been a great interview.

You're welcome. Hope to see you at Flex Camp Wall Street!