The Art of Software Development

About a year and a half ago my partner and I formed a corporation called Altruix, Inc. Our intention was to revolutionize the software market for both nonprofit and church organizations. It was obvious to me that this market lagged the mainstream by 5 to 10 years! The enterprise applications that we were turning out on a daily basis completely blew away the offerings of the closest competitors in the market. Our business model was to sell subscription services whereby we maintain the IT infrastructure and software for a monthly charge. We didn’t have greedy ambitions of getting rich but rather liking our jobs, serving a role in the community, and making a decent salary in the mean time. Like many .com ventures, this one never saw the light of day. However, I spent a large chunk of my life writing code in support of this effort. My intention is to share some of this code with any interested viewer who might benefit from it or see if we really knew what we were doing!

The basic architecture was a J2EE application running JBoss, Hibernate, Spring and a mostly Flex-based front end. The first generation of this application was an Eclipse-based Rich Client Platform (RCP) approach. After several months of development it became obvious to me as the front end developer that while Eclipse RCP is an awesome application framework, it was never designed to support what was effectively a massive CRUD application. All RCP development was abandoned and the new development proceeded with the Flex 3 framework when I saw the light and discovered the virtues of Flex. A screen shot of the RCP version is shown below.

RCP-Based People Editor

I must admit that I really like Java. However, Java can be a complete pain in the rear especially in the RCP world because of all the plug-in classloader issues. I found Flex to be a refreshing relief from the yoke of the Java classloader. The applications that I developed in Flex simply worked. And Flex is so much like Java that it feels like another dialect of Java (albeit a less mature one).

So I proceeded to rewrite the whole user interface using Flex. What took six months to write using RCP took a month or so to write using Flex. Woo hoo! What a productivity gain! A rich UI development environment without all the bloat of Java Web Start and all the supporting RCP jars. I couldn’t even imagine writing a user interface as robust and sophisticated as one I could do in Flex using Ajax and JSP’s even with JBoss Seam in my arsenal (Seam is way cool by the way).

The screenshot below shows the conceptual main page of the overall application. I envisioned blending the best of web technology with associated Flex applications. I now question whether this was the correct architectural approach now that AIR has been released to the market but that is water under the bridge now.

Conceptual Main Page

What you see below are screenshot of the basic person editor. We were storing data on anything you could ever want to know about a person. Editing 50 plus values for a person with several one-to-many relationships proved to be a giant challenge. The architectural approach that I used is really quite cool and could easily be the subject of another blog entry if anyone cares.

Flex-Based People Editor

My intent to this blog entry is to showcase actual work that yours truly has performed. I am engineer by training and a developer at heart. I have also hired many developers and always ask for code samples because I can tell a lot about you through the code that you write. To me code is poetry. Unfortunately, too many managers today code is a commodity that can easily be outsourced. That too is a subject of another blog at another time!

I have included the complete source tree for one of the applications in the Altruix, Inc suite called PeopleApp. I was the sole developer for this so it is a good indication of my coding style. The more informed reader may notice that I use PureMVC over Cairngorm as the application framework. That is a conscious choice that I have never regretted. PureMVC is superior in my mind but once again, that is the subject of another blog. Anyway, happy viewing for you geeks out there. Enjoy!

View PeopleApp Flex Source Code