Learned this shortcut after watching Derek Santos speak on PureMVC at last week’s Toronto Flex User Group meet. This hotkey has saved me so much time =) Eclipse is so huge, there is always something to learn.

I was searching for free UML diagraming tools/plugins for Eclipse and I tried out

ArgoUML
http://argouml.tigris.org/
- It’s alright
- Does the job

Eclipse UML2 with no UML2 tools meaning no GUI
http://www.eclipse.org/modeling/mdt/
- Too hardcore for me
- Zero boxes and lines
- Just all tag markup

Papyrus for UML
http://www.papyrusuml.org/
- Very cumbersome to use
- Did not like the # of clicks it took to change multiplicity of an association

Violet UML Editor
http://alexdp.free.fr/violetumleditor/
- Simplistic interface
- Mouse-wheel driven element selection makes for quick drawing
- Can run as a part of eclipse or a stand-alone.
- Can print pretty good (if you stick to the default Blue Vista theme)

Violet UML was a pleasure to use because of how quickly I was able to apply stripped down fundamental UML. If I were to go any more basic, I would be on a whiteboard, markers, and a digital camera.

Two constructive suggestions I would have for the awesome developers who put this together is:

Space Bar Use:
When the space bar is down, the cursor changes into a hand. The user may then click and drag on the diagram which will move the visible area to another part of the diagram. This saves a lot of time by not moving the mouse to the scroll bars on the bottom and the right.

Ctrl + Wheel Up and Down:
When Ctrl key is pressed, if the user scrolls up and down, it will either zoom in or out. Pressing on the wheel button would restore to a view that can view all 100% of the diagram.

Aside from these, Violet UML is a solid UML editor that I highly recommend.

Try it out without having to install it.
http://alexdp.free.fr/violetumleditor/demo/violet.jnlp

This is a good read that I would forward to anyone who wanted to know why AJAX can not do everything. Having built Flex/Flash content that will run in the Flash Player, I already knew much of these arguments but the article does a really good job of organizing the strengths, weaknesses, and commonalities between the two approaches of delivering information on the client side.

“…in real-wold use, Flex typically requires less coding to build the same or better functionality. The learning curve is higher, but the development times are significantly lower. “

Read the article here at Anthony Franco’s Blog.

This graph is from an old article but increasingly relevant topic when considering what backend technologies to choose when developing a web app. From what bits and pieces I know here and there, it seems to be in line with my impressions of them and what my peers (from each platform) tell me about it.

It’s a pretty graph. How accurate does this model the real world? Who knows….

In addition to Java, Flex 3 is allegedly supposed to better cater to these other crowds. Let’s hope and see!

The original article is here.

First-time Flash In TO poster “djshagz” shares experiences into using Microsoft Expression Blend and XAML.

“Well, I’ve been working with Blend for a few weeks now, working on a POC using WPF technologies for a client, as part of an exercise to learn XAML and Blend, figure out what the workflow it suppose to be and how it might fit within our company, etc.

I have to say, it was a really frustrating experience, but I have to qualify that by saying I had never done any C# sharp programming before…”

The post seems honnest and sincere. I have yet to take a stab at it myself. You can find the post here.

Today, I asked a co-worker whether or not it was possible to debug javascript in real-time inside the browser. I didn’t want to embed cumbersome temporary Alert()’s into the source which was already in production.

Specifically, I wanted to see how the .swf was reaching outside of the Flash Player and invoking a javascript function in the HTML source.

He led me to FireBug. I must say, this is probably one of the most impressive plugins for debugging javascript. With little guidance, I was able to setup a watch on the js function and was able to log the arguments passed to it into the console with no typing required. Point and click! I’ve never been this excited about javascript.

If you already knew about Firebug, I’m just sharing the love.

Rick Mason from FITC posted the Apollo Demo given by Mike Potter at January 31st meet. If it was on You Tube, it would be easier to embed the video but here’s the link to the presentation anyways.

http://www.flashinto.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=19532#19532

If you are in the Greater Toronto Area, the Flash In T.O. Flash Usergroup has monthly meetings. Visit http://www.flashinto.com/ for more details on the next monthly gathering.

Where I work, we have a full-time build engineer who manages and builds thousands of lines of code made by other people. It is an interesting and complicated process that will take you away from the low-levels of code and pit development skills into the deployment/version management process like creating branches, etc.

If you are thinking about CVS, you can go with Perforce (not free) which I heard is doing wonders. For my personal projects, I use Subversion (SVN) because of nice integration with Eclipse. Supposedly CVS is on it’s way out however it is the foundation repository of many companies today.

SVN has a very simple command-line interface which runs under *nix and has binaries for Windows. The docs for Subversion are some of the most concise, compact and simple reads I have enjoyed. They encourage you to read what you need to know and not everything from cover to cover.

SVN is not check-in/check-out like MS Visual SourceSafe. It is based on copy-modify-merge model of text files. There is also a capcity to lock files so that people cannot make overrwritting submissions. This is handy for binary files like .fla’s.

The following is just a quick summary of approaches I know to do 3-d on the web. If you know of any others, please feel free to leave a reference. Thanks!

Processing

Product Home
http://processing.org/

What’s Been Done With It
On http://processing.org/ main page, look on the left side for the “Examples” area.

Description
“Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.”

How To Learn
http://processing.org/learning/
Note: There is no conventional linear documentation HOWTO. You just look at the categorized prototype code, cut & paste, and understand how it works. The nice thing about the code is for the most part, it is very short.

Web Deployment of 3d
The Java run time environement is required to view Processing applets

Comments
- Fast learning curve to get some good results
- Growing technology gaining fast adoption because of high cohesion of doing visualization quickly
- Aimed towards dynamic interactive 3d experience
- FREE!

Macromedia Director MX 2004

Screen shot of Quake 3 Forever done in Director

Product Home
http://www.adobe.com/products/director/

What’s Been Done With It
http://digg.com/playable_web_games/Play_Quake_3_Directly_in_your_Browser!
http://necromanthus.com/Games/ShockWave/quake3.html

Description
“Macromedia Director is the proven multimedia authoring tool for professionals. Director combines broad media support for media types, ease of use, high-performance, and an infinitely extendible development environment to deliver rich content and applications for CDs, DVDs, kiosks, and the Internet. Director MX 2004 offers powerful new features, including two scripting languages, DVD-Video support, cross-platform publishing, and Flash MX 2004 integration”

How To Learn
- http://www.adobe.com/support/director/3d_index.html

Web Deployment Of 3D
- Users must have Adobe Shockwave Player Plug-in to view Director-generated content

Comments
- Lingo (the scripting language for Director) is better suited for doing large scale real-time 3d projects on the web
- Not free

Adobe Flash + Swift 3d

Product Home
http://www.erain.com/products/swift3d/

What’s Been Done With It
http://www.erain.com/products/swift3d/examples/

Description
“Swift 3D is the only 3D application to directly integrate with Macromedia Flash and provides unrivaled vector rendering quality and output style options. Swift 3D’s toolset and interface allow anyone to quickly create 3D content while providing a full set of advanced tools to grow into. With both vector and video export capabilities, Swift 3D provides the entire motion graphics design industry with a powerful, easy to use 3D solution that delivers high quality results for an affordable price”

How To Learn
- In-program tutorials

Web Deployment Of 3D
- Users need to have the Flash player installed
- Out of the 3 approaches to 3d I have mentioned, this one has the largest reach.

Comments
- Aimed towards graphic designers; Claims you can learn in under 1 hour
- The combination of these tools will allow you to do non-dynamic 3d whereas the other two mentioned are more code based
- Not for creating dynamic interactive 3d
- Least amount of programming involved

Google’s SketchUp

Product Home
http://www.sketchup.com/
http://sketchup.google.com/

What’s Been Done With It
Google Earth

Description
Google SketchUp (free) is an easy-to-learn 3D modeling program that enables you to explore the world in 3D. With just a few simple tools, you can create 3D models of houses, sheds, decks, home additions, woodworking projects - even space ships. And once you’ve built your models, you can place them in Google Earth, post them to the 3D Warehouse, or print hard copies.

How To Learn
- Video Tutorials
http://sketchup.google.com/tutorials.html
- In-program tutorials (very easy!)

Web Deployment Of 3D
- Google Earth: http://earth.google.com
- 3D Warehouse: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/

Comments
- Very pleasureable and powerful experience when developing 3d
- Not for creating dynamic interactive 3d
- Still growing, not taking over the 3d world at any rate
- To my knowledge, absolutely no programming

Adobe Flash using ActionScript only

Product Home
http://www.adobe.com/products/flash

What’s Been Done With It
http://digg.com/gaming_news/_Wolfenstein_3D_created_with_Flash_8

Description
“Flash® Professional 8 is the industry’s most advanced authoring environment for creating interactive websites, digital experiences and mobile content.

With Flash Professional 8, creative professionals design and author interactive content rich with video, graphics, and animation for truly unique, engaging websites, presentations or mobile content.”

How To Learn
http://www.kirupa.com/developer/actionscript/3dindex.htm (3d essentials in Flash)

Note: This approach has probably the worst learning curve as familarity with ActionScript is mandatory.

Web Deployment Of 3D
- Users need to have the Flash player installed

Comments
- If your serious about doing 3d on the web, I’d go with lingo as it offers more for 3d as I have been told

No, it’s not used cases…I mean Use Case

What is a Use Case?

• Text based description of how a system performs a behavior in response to an external actor’s request.
• Use cases at first should always be simple enough that BOTH technical experts and business persons can understand it.
• Use cases are robust enough to increase/decrease in complexity.

Who does Use Cases?

• It’s formally the role of requirements analysts who collect information from the client and their end users.
• Then they narrow the scope of each problem into a scenario. Each scenario logically has a use case that addresses a particular problem.

Where do Use Cases come from and where are they used?

• They are used as a formal component of the software development methodology called Unified Process (UP).

When should a Use Case be done?

• Under a UP methodology, they are done during the requirements collection phase or the Elaboration stage. Once a general high-level view of a system behavior (10%) is outlined in a use case, production ready coding may begin.
• Similarly in website design, they can be used to document expectations between the client and the UI designer as to what is expected when a user visits the site and performs an action. Think text based storyboards.

Why… You should do a use case?

• Provides an objective corner stone: It serves a common platform between developers, business persons, and the end-users.
• Guideline For Implementation: Makes for a good checklist that the system is performing to specification.
• Accountability: If the system performs to the official specification but it fails to do an unspecified task, then it is easier to figure out who is responsible.
• Late entrants can catch up: By having use case documentation, people who join the project in the later stages can get up to speed.

Why you shouldn’t do a Use Case?

• Use cases can be too narrow of a description that it ignores the formal definition of the problem domain.
• Use cases are systems centric and do not revolve around the user experience. Therefore, use cases are not helpful in UI design.
• Use cases can be abused in the amount of resources (time and money), which may undermine resource-limited goals like software delivery deadlines.
• Process heavy projects tend to fail because they people get to wrapped up in the process.

More About Use Cases
http://alistair.cockburn.us/index.php/Use_case_fundamentals