Java2SoA Revolution. Dev2Dev TechDays : April 15th : Atlanta,GA

Dev2Dev TechDays Java2SOA Revolution

I have an opportunity to attend Java2SOA Revolution - Dev2Dev TechDays last week April 16th. The Dev2Dev TechDays are half day developer focused seminars that provide a guide for building SOA in Java. Presented by technical experts from throughout BEA – these events will inform about the latest technologies for extending Java2SOA.

Overall cool experience with lots of knowledge, demo and reusable code - about BEA product tools along with an opportunity to meet the like minded people from trenches. :D)


Venue

The venue was the Georgia Aquarium. Fantastically beautiful, dazzling and splendid blueish water filled vibrant, dynamic colorful sea creatures. What a perfect setting to learn more about BEA's Liquid vision about SOA. And another complement to the Liquid was the "AIR" from Adobe. Isn't it an excellent experience to live. The Liquid and the AIR at the same time. :D) With eight million gallons of fresh and marine water and more aquatic life than found in any other aquarium, Georgia Aquarium makes the perfect Venue for knowledge eager development community. The Oceans Ballroom is one of the exotic, spacious and flexible meeting space I have ever been. The cherry on top of the cream is that the Georgia Aquarium offers catering by the world-renowned Chef Wolfgang Puck and we have an opportunity to have continental breakfast, so we can concentrate on the business at hand surrounded by a gorgeous setting.



Event Sponsor : Adobe : Global Event Sponsor

These Dev2Dev TechDays event has been sponsered by Adobe. The Adobe Engg has given a fresh AIR demo alongside BEA Engg team. Adobe AIR enables to have favorite web applications as a offline widget or a disconnected portlet. I mean to say that Adobe AIR runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems.


Dev2Dev
Just in brief before I move ahead with agenda and demos etc stuff, I would like to share bit about BEA's Dev2Dev "By developers, for Developers" developer-product portal. It allow developers to "Get Involved" into "New to Java?" fundas, Blogs from industry experts, CodeShare, Newsgroups, Wiki, User Groups and allow you to "Submit Content/Code". Also it has Product Centers, Technology Centers and various resources containing Dev2Dev Media Center, utilities & tools etc. It is a one happening place. Apart from this portal, BEA has Arch2Arch and Exec2Exec. More about them in different blogs as time arise. :D)

One of the interesting announcement about one of the "coming soon" feature. It is about social networking integration into Facebook.


Dev2Dev Tech Days content

Dev2Dev Tech Days content is based on the new BEA WebLogic Platform 10.2 Evaluation guide. The guide is a comprehensive tour of WebLogic Platform 10.2 for the practitioner (developer, dev manager, architect) . The guide uses an end-to-end order management application scenario to demonstrate concepts. The demos are a small fraction of what is covered and available in the guide. The guide ties together all of demos into one tutorial application with step by step instructions and screenshots. It includes all source code / Eclipse projects. 500+ pages of optional exercises and discussion topics! Spotlight on Adobe Flex extends “Avitek” application scenario with Rich Internet UI. The downloads section on 10.2 Evaluation Guide allow to download Applications and Tools like BEA WebLogic Platform 10.2, WebLogic Workshop Studio 10.2 + Adobe Flex Builder 2 and Adobe Lifecycle Data Services Express. Also it has platform Evaluation source files.

Demo

Avitek is a consumer electronics company. Their existing Order Management System (OMS) requires enhancement, not re-write. The demos are centered around the OMS and various business use cases from that system. The source code and information can be found in 10.2 platform evaluation guide.

One interesting BEA Workshop Studio 10.2 and Adobe Flex Builder 2 : Medrec Patient Application Demo I have come across is on BEA Dev2Dev Media Center. It talks about how Flex & Workshop can be used to provide a single Java/Flex environment for RIA and WebLogic Server side development. The medrec example application that ships with WebLogic Server has been redesigned for new RIA technologies, and is constructed in three layers, the Web tier (Flex), the Business tier (Spring services exposed as Web Services), and the Data tier (ORM types and corresponding Spring DAOs). It uses Adobe and BEA's Eclipse plug-ins to address each layer of the application. Thanks to Spring, the web tier is replaceable without changing the other two, as they are unaware of what web technology is providing the view.

Agenda

It covered following main items:

1. The conceptual framework: SOA Reference Architecture
2. Connectivity Services Layer & Demonstration
3. Business Process Services Layer & Demonstration
4. Service Mediation Layer & Demonstration
5. Presentation Services Layer & Demonstration
6. Flex in Presentation Services & Demonstration
7. Continuing the Java2SOA Revolution at home

Below is an overview schedule for the day:

8:00 AM - 8:30 AM	Continental Breakfast & Registration
8:30 AM - 10:00 AM	BEA Welcome and Presentation Developing POJO components Extending POJO components into Java Web Services Visually creating and testing integration process designs Integrating processes into existing systems
10:00 AM - 10:15 AM	Break
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM	BEA Presentation Using Eclipse to Proxy enable Java Web Services Configuring a proxy without development Developing custom portlets in the presentation layer Linking portlets into integration processes
11:15 AM - 11:45 AM	Adobe presentation Developing a Rich UI with Flex in Eclipse Connecting a Flex UI to the back-end SOA
11:45 AM	Summary & Q&A
12:00 PM	Close

Resources Shared

Some of the resources which has been shared are:

• WebLogic Portal's site to preview upcoming features, view new demos, and check out our latest ideas.

wlp.bea.com

• The SoA Reference Architecture White Paper and lots of other SOA Goodies:

http://www.bea.com/framework.jsp?CNT=index.htm&FP=/content/solutions/soa&WT.ac=topnav_solutions_soa

• James Ward - RIA Cowboy. He has presented on Rich UI with Flex in Eclipse and connecting it to the back-end SOA.
  

jamesward.com/census and http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/


Goodie Bag

I walked out of the seminar with couple of cool goodies. A BEA think liquid folder containing beautiful blank T-Shirt, couple of DVDs with products, source code, education catalog and printed presentation. Also I have received tickets for Georgia Aquarium.


Overall a cheerful, bellyful, mindful, cool experience...Cheers...

Photoshop Express Adobe Free Web Tool

Adobe has launched a free web based Photoshop Express tool. The website is https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html. It is in public beta, Adobe Photoshop Express is a free online photo sharing, editing, and storage site. At beta launch, users will be provided with 2GB of free storage and integration with popular Web apps like Facebook and Photobucket, with further partnerships with sites like Flickr in the works. Designed to be, in part, an entry into the sometimes intimidating Photoshop series, Express offers a number of tools aimed directly at beginners, including user-friendly one-click versions of essential editing tools like cropping, blemish and red-eye removal, sharpening, and resizing. A number of other effects are also offered at launch, including sketch, pop color, and distort.

Thanks for these questions from Cris (http://pintandoenpositivo.blogspot.com/):

• can we use personal tools, new fonts, brushes, actions, downloaded from adobe exchange or another site?
• how install it?
  

Here is what I have understood after playing with PhotoShop Express.

• Photoshop Express is Adobe Macromedia Flash (specifically Flash Player 9 (version 9.0.0.115 or later)) based lite version of PhotoShop product.
• Photoshop Express works with JPEG photos only. Per Adobe, TIFF and PSD are of large size and could not be uploaded without timeout. GIFF format has low photo quality.
• Photos larger than 10M and 4000 pixels in height and width cannot be uploaded. Photos larger than 2880x 2880 pixes will be shrunk after editing.
  

Here is the screen shot and tools available online for you to use with photos/images uploaded on Photoshop Express website:

• Crop & Rotate:Turn it, straighten it, crop out the background.


• Auto Correct:Automatic, one-click, optimal lighting and contrast adjustment.


• Exposure:Change the brightness of the photo.


• Red-Eye Removal:Removes red eyes caused by some camera flashes.


• Touchup:Remove scratches and other imperfections.


• Saturation:Ramp up the colors to blinding brightness, dampen them down to black and white, or anywhere in between.


• White Balance:Ever notice how people look different inside an office with the ugly fluorescent tubes, as opposed to outside on a bright sunny day? Adjust the white balance and you change the type of lighting in the photo.


• Highlight:The brightest parts of a photo are the highlights. This control lets you brighten or darken just the brightest part of the photo, without affecting the darker parts (we call those the shadows).


• Fill Light:If you take a shot facing into the sun, your subject can end up too dark due to the camera’s automatic exposure adjustment. Fill Light brightens the dark area without overbrightening the background.


• Sharpen:It’s like putting in your contacts. Suddenly everything comes more into focus.


• Soft Focus:It’s like taking your contacts out. Soft Focus creates a subtle blur for artistic effect.


• Hue:This one changes all the colors in a photo at once.


• Black & White:Control how the colors are converted when you change a photo to black and white.


• Tint:Imagine instead of black and white, you want red and white, or pale brown and white for that old Western look.


• Sketch:Makes any photo look like you drew it yourself.


• Distort:Stretch, twist, bulge specific areas of your photos.

Now to your question, about using personal tools and other goodies you have on your local machine, apart from above things I do not find any option to upload those tools.

Adobe says that "Photoshop Express is not an application on your computer so you can use it anywhere. If you want a copy of a photo on your computer, run your mouse over the photo to reveal the options menu at the bottom right. Open the menu and select Download, once you’re done editing."

So in short, you have to work with your images/photos online using Photoshop Express and offline using your all powerful complete Photoshop.

Enjoy...