“There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the Office of the Presidency.”

Where has this type of spirit gone in our nation?  Is it dead or just sleeping waiting for the right time to reemerge?  It makes me sad I wasn’t around to see the US in it’s glory days, just in it’s seeming twilight, although this is a ray of hope:

Phoenix lander descends to Martian surface, shot from MRO

Now, onto why I’m posting today, along the way I found some annoying things about how FlexBuilder played with the SDK.  For instance, the .flexLibProperties file that is hidden in your FB project, is not the right format to be taken in as a parameter to “compc” ( the library compiler, which seems to require a list of class names to include ), so I wrote a quick Python script to convert that file into a config file that is readable by compc.  Here is how to include it in your Ant script:

<target name=”setupClassList”>
    <exec executable=”python” failonerror=”yes”>
        <arg line=”${helperDir}/classFileConverter.py ${lib_root_dir}/.flexLibProperties classes.xml”/>
    </exec>
</target>


 

It takes in two parameters so you can manipulate the output location of the new file.
Another odd part is that the application descriptor for an AIR project doesn’t get correctly populated.  FB itself fills in the <content> tag for you when it goes to compile.  If you look in your source directory the application descriptor has this string, “[This value will be overwritten by Flex Builder in the output app.xml]” instead of the name of the SWF.  One more little python script:

<exec executable=”python” failonerror=”yes”>
    <arg line=”${helperDir}/appDescrFix.py ../bin-debug/${app_descriptor}”/>
</exec>

Of course, I am going to give you the scripts!  Here are the links:
.flexLibProperties Converter
Application Descriptor Fixer

If someone knows a much easier way to do this just using the command line tools and/or Ant, I’d love to hear it!

My blog has been quiet and I’ve been off Twitter for close to a month now, mostly due to taking some well needed time off after the SAP Fellowship but also weighing a pretty big choice I had to make.

Stay at Colgate-Palmolive or leave for a job working for Adobe in a new product group creating a new enterprise software offering.  A new job certainly has its risks especially when compared to the stable home I have made for myself at Colgate.  However, with some good advice from my friends I have decided to leave Colgate to pursue the opportunity with Adobe.

Working at Colgate has allowed me to do so much and opened so many doors for me.   I cannot begin to express how much I appreciated all the support through the years the company’s management has give me.  I’ve traveled ( and taken pictures ) all over the world from India to Bangkok to Dublin.  I got to learn what makes a business like Colgate run from both the IT and business side.  I’ve presented in front of thousands of people in both the US and EU.  These experiences cannot be learned from a book and having this as my first job out of school was a great experience.

However, working for Adobe is going to be a great new chapter in my life — getting to see how software goes from just an idea on a whiteboard to a full fledged product is going to quite an adventure and I look forward to the challenge.

Thanks again to Colgate and more importantly all the Colgate people that made my time there so enjoyable.

For those of you keeping track my last day at Colgate will be Jan 18th and I will start at Adobe that following Monday, Jan 21st.

“[B]eauty and sexiness is in the eye of the beholder… [seeing] UPS give each one of its drivers a DIAD - and they did it years before the recent wave of personal gadgets - with GPS, wifi, scanning and other technologies. And with a battery that lasts all day. Can our iPhones do that?”

Vinnie does a great job showing how underneath the ugly exterior enterprise software is amazing and sexy.  Most of these posts are all missing the important comparison Scoble is making that Nick Carr picks up on here:

perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use

The post from Michael Krigsman(which although Nick beats up on chooses not to link to) talks about, how all this isn’t relevant because enterprise software is “intended to “enable core business processes” with a high degree of reliability, security, scalability, and so on.”

Enterprise vendors need to be keenly aware of the consumer market but, SAP’s customers don’t pay them to run around like Scoble and chase every new technology/website that comes out.  They pay them to make measured, smart choices with what they create and how they spend their R&D money.  Their customers do indeed expect the software they create to have a “a high degree of reliability, security, scalability.”

Enterprise vendors have an advantage – they can ride on top of the frothy startup market cherry picking things that work well and will deliver value back to an enterprise’s bottom line.  In the consumer tech industry, the invisible hand of the market is addicted to crack and has the attention span of a two year old.  The consumer market is chaotic, jumpy and prone to fickleness.  Online companies/ideas are created and destroyed everyday, and it is up to Scoble and other followers of tech to survey what’s out there, they need the thousands of readers.  The two industries have totally different business models, Twitter needs millions of users to monetize their software, SAP is very profitable on about 40k “users” world wide.

This shows the Enterprise software market is much more focused and so is their advertising.  Dan Farber does an excellent job of handling this topic and refocusing the discussion on what Gates actually said:

The business computing market, which is way bigger than the consumer computing market, no one pays attention to it. Even in the Wall Street Journal, and you think, oh, this is the paper they’re going to tell me about business computing; no, it’s all about consumer computing

LiveSide.net - Bill Gates, Mix n Mash, and the future of Microsoft

Dan goes on to point out why ZDnet covers enterprise topics:

We recognize that in the 21st century you cannot easily separate the two, given technology is deeply embedded in work and personal lives… [T]he financial equation is not just about page views or number of readers–more important is the quality of readers we draw into the ZDNet orbit

Who am I to contradict Dan when it comes to the determination of advertising revenue — after all he is the Editor in Chief of ZDnet.  In the advertising arena you can also point to things like SAP sponsoring golf stars, tennis pros, formula one cars, etc.  Who watches these things?  CIOs, and other TLA execs who make these decisions.  If SAP cared about CPM they would advertise with NASCAR.  Let’s just give SAP the benefit of the doubt that they understand their market more then Scoble.

I couldn’t agree more that Enterprise vendors need to make things easier to use and an all around friendlier experience but, they need to be smart and measured because that’s what their customers want.

For some reason none of these blogs comes right out and says the obvious.  Software development methodologies are like religions:  everyone has one and they all hate everyone else’s for no reason except they aren’t their sworn religion.  In real life, this is dangerous, expensive and prone to the types of failures noted in the blogs.

I haven’t worked in industry for 35+ years like Mr. Nizker but after a few projects it became obvious to me when you can use agile methods and when waterfall is the most appropriate.  Let’s try and do what none of the other blogs tried to do and break it down.

“Roll-out”

A very common thing in large companies (this was found via the CIO Weblog right?) is to take a newly developed solution and push it all over the world to standardize a business process.  These systems are the perfect candidate for the waterfall method.  The users can look at a system and see the gaps and let the people in charge of creating their “copy” of the system know about the changes.  This allows the “developers” to take the requirements in advance and while creating this new “copy” of the system add the modifications required for the new location.  Once the system is ready it can be easily tested with prior business cases and be easily validated for the new location.   I guess this is the “deterministic” task talked about by CIO Magazine.

“I think I need…”

Everything else falls into this category.  The category where the person defining the system has only half of a clue about what they need or want.  I do like the way Mr. Nizker classifies these problems, “[there is a] volatile reality, which changes on them every day [and] the systems we develop influence [that] reality.”  It’s sort of the Heisenberg uncertainly principal of IT systems.  Until we start to peel back the layers the people trying to define the system don’t know the extent of their own delusion.  You should think of it like therapy we must slowly work to the actual root of the problem.  You can only do this in an iterative manner until the user has seen the solution they have no clue what their problem even is.

It is all about using the right tool for the job and being able to tell the different before you start.  Just as using the iterative method is overkill for a roll-out style project, the waterfall spells total doom for the iterative project.  I rarely have a hard time deciding which tool to use.

Sorry all.

The whole community collected around 2.5 million points last year.

If we reach the same amount of points next year, we will have 100K Euro. (If we don’t, we will walk in shame.)

If we reach 3.0 million points, SAP will donate 150K Euro.

Now if we even reach 3.5 million points, the amount will rise to the maximum of 200K Euro.

From the World Food Programme’s web site:

It costs just 10 US cents a day to give a child a cup of porridge at school. An additional nine US cents a day provides a child with a nutritional package, including basic health and sanitation support.

1 Pt * ( # of Euros / # of Points ) *  ( 1 USD / .67 EUR ) * ( child / .1 USD ) = Conversion

Roughly translated back to points that means for every point you earn on SDN you will feed between .6 and .85 children for one day.  With the average blog post getting around 50 points, one blog can feed 30-40 children that day.

“One person can make a difference and every person should try.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Let’s start off with one of the simpler examples just to get the hang of it.  Use SAPLink and install this function group and generate a web service from the one function in it.  Now, lets write some Flex code to call this.

Import Statements

A few people have asked me to add the import statements to this.  For reference if you go to the object that has the error, move your cursor to the end of the word hold control and press space the import will be added for you automatically, welcome to the wonderful world of a good IDE.  But the following in a <mx:Script> block between the <mx:Application> tags.

import mx.rpc.AbstractOperation;
import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent;
import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
import mx.rpc.soap.LoadEvent;
import mx.rpc.soap.WebService;

Simplest Example

Step 1 - Get your WSDL

1 private function callWebService():void{
2     fooService = new WebService();
3     fooService.wsdl = "http://localhost/sap/bc/srt/rfc/sap/Z_TEST_CHANGING_PARAM?sap-client=300&wsdl=1.1";
4     fooService.addEventListener(LoadEvent.LOAD, loadListener);
5     fooService.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT, resultTrigger);
6     fooService.addEventListener(FaultEvent.FAULT,fault);
7     fooService.loadWSDL();
8 }

Line by Line:

1. Declare a function that will start the whole process
2. Create a WebService object, this should be global or at least visible to the other methods ( you’ll need it later )
3. Point the WS to the location of the WSDL
4. Add an EventListener for when the Loading of the WSDL is complete
5. Add an EventListener for the results coming back from the call
6. Add an EventListener for any errors that occur
7. Tell the WS to load the WSDL

Step 2 - Set Some Parameters

1 private function loadListener(event:LoadEvent):void{
2     var op:AbstractOperation = fooService.getOperation("Z_DOUBLE_ROWS");
3     var input:Object = new Object();
4     input.TEST = new Array();
5     input.TEST.push("foo");
6     input.TEST.push("bar");
7     op.arguments = input;
8     op.send();
9 }

Line by Line:

1. Declare a function who handles the event you subscribed to in the Step 1 line 4.
2. Get the Operation from the WSDL file.  This is one of those “standard” ways of doing things.  If you look at your WSDL file you will see that it could have more then one operation in it, this gets the particular operation you want to call.
3. Create a dynamic object that will hold the inbound parameters to your WS.  In this case the parameter TEST is a table of strings.
4. Here we create what Flex builder thinks is how to hold  a table, an Array.
5. Then we push each “row” of the table into the array again, in this case it’s just one string at a time.
6. See Line 5
7. We then map the input object to the arguments of the WS.
8. Send our request including all the input data to the server

Step 3 - Look at the Output

1 private function resultTrigger(event:ResultEvent):void{
2     var item:String;
3     for each(item in event.result){
4         trace(item);
5     }
6 }

Line by Line

1. Define a function to handle the event from section 1 line 5
2. Declare on object to hold each result
3. Loop at each item in the result list, which happen to be strings.
4. Print them out to the debug console

I will talk about more advanced parsing of the result set later on.

Inbound Table Parameter

First, get your WSDL, in this case I will be using the FM BAPI_FLIGHT_GETLIST from the SFLIGHTS example we are all so fond of.  You should run this FM a few times to make sure you have data on the ABAP side, I will be passing in a date range to this FM so, you might want to find two dates that return some data for you. ( I named my WebService “Z_GET_FLIGHT_LIST” )

Step 1 - Get Your WSDL

This is the same exact thing you did before, just with a different WSDL.

Step 2 - Set some Parameters

There is a strange behavior with ABAP WebServices where if you have a table that is both Input and Output you must pass it as part request to get it filled.  You’ll see in a second:

1 private function loadListener(event:LoadEvent):void{
2     var op:AbstractOperation = fooService.getOperation("BAPI_FLIGHT_GETLIST");
3     var input:Object = new Object();
4     input.FLIGHT_LIST = new Array();
5     input.RETURN = new Array();
6     op.arguments = input;
7     op.send();
8 }

Line by Line

1. Define a function that handles the event
2. Get the right operation
3. Dynamic input object
4. You have to pass blank parameters to the WS so that the Web Application Server will fill them
5. See line 4
6. Same as last time
7. Same here

Set Table Parameters

1     var dateRangeRow:Object = new Object();
2     input.DATE_RANGE = new Array();
3     dateRangeRow.SIGN = "I";
4     dateRangeRow.OPTION = "EQ";
5     dateRangeRow.LOW = "2002-12-20";
6     dateRangeRow.HIGH = "";
7     input.DATE_RANGE.push(dateRangeRow);

Line by Line ( add this between lines 5 and 6 from the prior example )

1. Create a new dynamic object that holds a Row of the DATE_RANGE table
2. Create an array called DATE_RANGE which will map to the DATE_RANGE input parameter
3. Set each field dynamically
4. More fields
5. More fields
6. More fields ( don’t need to pass this one because it’s blank )
7. Push this row into the array

Step 3 - Look at the Output

1 private function resultTrigger(event:ResultEvent):void{
2     var row:Object;
3     for each (row in event.result.FLIGHT_LIST){
4         trace(row.AIRLINE + " " + row.CITYFROM);
5     }
6 }

Line by Line

1. Function, again.
2. Use a place holder dynamic object
3. Loop at the table called FLIGHT_LIST ( looks like ABAP doesn’t it? )
4. Print to the console the fields you want ( looks like ABAP doesn’t it? )

Disclaimer: There are a number of ways to call WebServices in Flex, I believe this is the most complete and “standard” way to call them, if not someone please point me to Adobe docs that show the most correct way.

When I sit in my car, I want my Life Hub to connect up to my music interface device which connects to my car so the controls are mapped to the steering wheel and the music comes out the speakers.

When I go to the office, I want my Life Hub to connect to my work phone and register my cell number so my work phone will ring with calls placed to my cell phone.

When I take a picture with my camera, I want it saved on my Life Hub.  I want to be able to browse those pictures on my smart phone and email them to my friends.  Kind of like Dave’s social camera.  If I so chose my Life Hub can broadcast to others the picture I just took, without or without the tagging my camera added.

Why do I need 97 different syncing programs to get my Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, and iCal Calendar to line up!  Aren’t these just visualizations of the same data set?  If I had my calendar on my Life Hub, I could just access it from there.  Who cares where I’m sitting, at my home machine, work machine or at the Library.

So, what is a Life Hub, basically a high capacity solid state memory drive ( Intel is looking to get up to 160GB in the next few years ) with a very high bandwidth wireless connection.  It has a UI that lets you “allow” devices to connect for a period of time and access certain types of data on your Life Hub, read and/or write.  The idea is that this thing should eventually be small enough to fit on a key chain, think thumb drive on crack — in reality it could be your key chain!  Ever seen someone unlock and start their Prius without taking a key out?

If it had strong encryption you could store your X-Rays and patient files on the drive.  What if you could allow your doctor to review a certain set of them for a period then when they are done zap the records back to you?  Why should Microsoft control your health records, or even Google for that matter?  Today Adobe PDFs can be locked so they are only viewed for a period of time.

Is all this possible today?  Some of it — some of it is also hard, standardizing the wireless protocol for instance.  Currently, there is no wireless standard that rivals Firewire for throughput sending a RAW image from today’s DSLR cameras, BlueTooth just won’t do.

I have no idea how to solve these problems or “the chicken and the egg problem” of this only being useful if there are devices out there that can connect to it.  I do know that I want one.

Looks pretty normal till you wait for the last line to scroll by:

Don’t know what the deal is with Zuckerman’s Mom but, hey if you need that bug fixed in the SDK just send a pie over.

UPDATE 11/02:

Deepa Subramaniam from the Flex SDK team was kind enough to shed some light on this for me:

Banana Cream Pie is a favorite treat of the FlexBuilder folks. Us SDK’ers are more partial to Peanut Brittle….
sugar = our friend.

So it turns out if you have a Flex Builder issue, Banana Cream Pie, if it’s a SDK problem Peanut Brittle c/o Deepa.