However, Yahoo! Groups is such an unfortunate and antiquated technology to use for developers asking and answering questions.  Sure, it’s great if you like communication in a 1995-email-list-serv sort of way.

However, it doesn’t have to be this painful.  By using StackOverflow.Com, all your developer Q&A pains are solved.

Stackoverflow offers:

1)  Better long term archivability of question and answers, all nicely rated and richly formatted.  On the Yahoo! groups, you get a string of old emails, including usually the original question again, all in a nasty string-formatted email archive that you have to dig through.  Don’t believe me, this is usually what a thread message looks like.

2)  StackOverflow allows formatting source code so it is readable by both the questioners, the answerers, and those in the future trying to decipher both.  Try maintaining your source code formatting when sending through an email, or worse, using Yahoo!’s poor website UI for posting to the Group.  And if you’re generous enough to answer someone’s questions, why complicate by having to deciphering the poor formatting?  Or, if you’re fortunate enough to view the archive through one of the many spiders that you find via Google, it might look like this.  Ick.

3)  Adding images and screen shots that are managed in the flow of your question.  This allows for captioning of images, etc..  Take a look at my latest question’s nice formatting (or, look at the answer to this question, with nice source code, inline, with ability to leave well formatted comments around it).  Try doing that in the Yahoo! interface.

4)  Searching by keywords and tags.  Want just see what’s happening for “Flex”, just search on the Flex tag, which BTW, gets a nice “Adobe” icon next to it, letting you know that’s the Flex tag isn’t related to something else.

5)  Sometimes your question isn’t exactly a Flex question.  Maybe it falls more into the realm of “Flash”, or “Actionscript” or “AIR”.  So the answer might be more pertinent to a larger audience than initially thought.  It’s important to think of the larger audience for your questions, as someone down the road might have a similar issue as you and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t easily find the answer to your question, as it might keep them from asking the same question again.

I could keep listing more, but I don’t think I need to.  I wish the Adobe gurus like Alex Harui (@aharui) would let the Flex Coders depreciate, and have everyone move on.  (Sorry to only name Alex, as there’s lots of good people there answering questions)  And btw, I fully visit Flex Coders because I know that some of the Adobe people actually take a lot of time to answer questions there.  (I’m also sure they have a valid reason for maintaining the Flex Coders list.)

StackOverflow.com has a perfectly viable Adobe user base answering all sorts of questions, today, right now.  However, this suggestion is still based on the fact that I have to go use the Flex Coders group at Yahoo for the really tricky things that no one else can fix.

So get started today by viewing the Stackoverflow.com’s Flex questions (and answers).

Anyway, all the talks from Friday night are up at Adobe.TV. The mostly discussed the new features, the new Effects, the new Spark components, etc. Must watch viewing, and most of them are short (20 minuets), for someone wanting to get a quick overview of what’s new in Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4r.  For you, download the demo of Flash Builder 4 over at Adobe. There’s so many great things with the new in Flash Builder 4, but, I’ll let you read about them here.

My only regret is that I’m going to be stuck supporting a very large SaaS Flex 3 application for some time. And it might be difficult to trickle in new stuff in the mean time.

I’ve been in the camp of small, lightweight dev machines for a couple years now.  My current development machine is a three year old Dell 700m.  Mine is a single core 1.6 ghz with 1.5 megs of RAM.  It’s lightweight and small.  It’s has a 12 inch screen, but I often have it hooked up to a 20" monitor.  Even three years later I still get nearly 3 hours of battery life.   I do hate the fact that it has a small keyboard, but I’ve gotten used to it.  The best part, I paid $785 for it, including shipping and tax (though not including the 1.5 gigs of RAM).

I love the small form factor of this laptop.  I work in places I never could with a desktop, nor would I enjoy as much with a 15" laptop.  I watch movies in cramped airplane seats (try that with a 15.4 inch monitor) and while riding trains down the North East Corridor.  I start off my morning working in my office tethered to the large monitor, then I move to the couch where I slouch with the laptop on my stomach; out to the kitchen for coffee and NPR; up to the roof deck to bronze the skin; downstairs to the couch where I plug it in while the battery charges and CNN is rambles in the background; down the street for an afternoon pickup-me-up coffee.  The small form laptop is liberating in ways I never thought of back in the days when I was always coding and working at a desk.

I often carry the small form laptop with one hand, lid open, while other hand carries coffee, papers, magazine, books, etc…

I have a powerful desktop, but I don’t use it for work.  Initially, I did.  But when I started developing with Adobe tools, my laptop was turned into my dev machine, so I could go to the library and work in the air-conditioning.   With the latest release of Flex Builder 3, I still don’t need a faster computer.

I haven’t tried running Visual Studio 2008 on it.  I haven’t run a full-fledged Microsoft development stack (IIS, SqlServer, Visual Studio, etc.) on my old dell, nor done any development within a Virtual PC/VMWware VM (which is how I develop on the desktop, using VMWare images running different environments).  Nor, am I happy with Photoshop performance (I only edit photos, no web graphics work).  Which is why Ill be getting a new laptop, probably something of the 13.3 inch size, and one of the new Penryn 2.5 processors.  Ideally with 256 graphics (can’t really find any 13.3" computer right now with that, though, I don’t game and probably don’t need it).  In my previous post I mentioned my wants in a laptop, I’ve only recently narrowed it down to having to be powerful AND a small form factor.

While I don’t agree with all the Apple fans touting the AIR as being so massively innovative — even Dell had offerings back in 2003 (300m, x300) and before (can’t remember the model) that had sub three-pound laptops with detachable DVD drives for the jet-setting executive — I will agree about how liberating a small computer is.  And for most people, even many developers, the lightweight machine offers plenty of horsepower for building innovative software.

Examples:

• A http DELETE requested from the URL http://www.simplifiedchaos.com/articles/123452 will DELETE article #123452
• A http PUT with the same URL will update the data
• A POST will create the data;
• A GET will read the data.

To help you get started with REST, here’s some links that I found useful:

• From the July 2007 issue of Dr Dobb’s, SOA, Web Services, and RESTful Systems (Good introduction and Java specific sample code).
• Joe Gregorio over at XML.Com has an excellent collection of articles.  Start with How to Create a REST Protocol.
• RESTful Rails Development is geared towards the Ruby on Rails developer, but has an excellent introduction explaining some of the benefits: clean URLs, less code, CRUD applications, clearer app design.
• For .NET and Java Developers: Simple JAVA and .NET SOA interoperability.
• For Java Developers:  Gomba Java RESTful Web Services, The REST of the Web.
• Yahoo! REST Discussion Group
• Wikipedia’s REST entry
• The Official REST Wiki

There is plenty of reading here to get you started, enjoy.