RIA Evangelist – Piotr Walczyszyn Interview

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RIA Evangelist – Piotr Walczyszyn Interview

February 8th, 2010

I met Piotr while working together on the portal project. We finished the same university, though I do not recall meeting on this occasion. Piotr is now Adobe platform evangelist, leads riaspace.net blog. I lead this blog in which I broach topics related to RIA quality assurance and testing, that are very good circumstances to talk.

Marcin: What are the roots of your interest around the RIA technologies?

Piotr: Actually my interest in RIA predates the coining of the term itself. When I was studying at Polish-Japanese Institute of Information Technology, part of my undergraduate thesis was about building an e-commerce site. This was back in early 2001 and the technologies used were Active Server Pages (ASP) and JavaScript. It was really very much like what we would today call RIA, and it also incorporated many concepts of today’s social networks. After I graduated I started working at ABB Company as a software developer building internal systems for production process optimization and automation. I remember one of the first projects (still in 2001) in which we built a browser-based front-end that made heavy use of IXMLHTTPRequest to feed self-built SVG graphs. Today I would probably use Flex or some AJAX library and have the same thing done in a day or two, but back then it was quite a challenge to achieve this type of user experience with graphics rendered on the client side and minimal browser reloads.

Marcin: What was your career path? What do you do professionally nowadays?

Piotr: As I mentioned, I started my career at ABB where I worked for nearly seven years, starting as a Software Developer and ending as Software Engineering for Process Automation Group Leader. My group and I were responsible for building Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and scheduling systems using technologies like Java/JEE and .NET. At the same time I was doing some freelancing and consulting work with up-to-date technologies such as Flex, AJAX, and RIA in general. In mid-2008 I heard that Adobe was recruiting for a Flex Evangelist role based in Poland. This was about the time that Flex 3 was really taking-off and AIR 1.0 was also released early that year. I applied and successfully managed to pass all the interviews. Today my role is Platform Evangelist and I’m responsible not only for Flex but all the products that are under the Flash Platform umbrella. That includes Adobe AIR (which is closest to my heart), Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, Flash Player, Flash Professional, ColdFusion, LiveCycle Data Services, BlazeDS, Flash Platform Services…

Marcin: You are the author of RiaSpace.net blog. Tell me what topics can be found there? Is there something about quality assurance / testing ?

Piotr: On RiaSpace blog I usually cover topics and examples related to RIA technologies, especially Flex and AIR. On a few occasions I get into quality assurance or testing, but to be honest I’ve never gone very deep into it. I did write a series of blog posts on different tools, frameworks and libraries for Flex and one of those focused on testing, mocking, and code coverage solutions for Flex. It is still available here: http://www.riaspace.net/2009/01/flex-developer-tools-testing-mocking-and-code-coverage/. I believe QA and testing are becoming hotter topics as developers build more production applications and the Flex community matures.

Marcin: How would you rate the development of RIA technologies in 2010? Gartner’s latest report shows that all players have equal chances. Do you agree?

Piotr: I think the RIA scene in 2010 will be very interesting; we will see releases of new products from all camps. Adobe will be releasing Flex 4 and AIR 2.0 with new tools like Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst, which I think, will be a big competitive differentiator and game changer for serious RIA development. Another very important advance coming from the Adobe side is Flash Player 10.1, which will bring the full power of Flash to all major smartphone platforms (except maybe one), netbooks, tablets, televisions, and consumer electronics. Of course others are not standing still; Microsoft is planning Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010. Silverlight 4 is a significant release that brings it even closer to the Flash Player feature set. On the other side there is AJAX/HTML 5—strongly backed and promoted by Google, Apple, Mozilla, and other browser manufacturers. It still has long way to go to be able to compete either with Flash or Silverlight. It probably will become a standard one day, but for sure it won’t be in 2010. I should probably also mention JavaFX here but I’m afraid 2010 may be difficult in that area, with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun.
In the long run this is really good for all of us. Competition really drives innovation and it makes tools and technologies more open and available.

Marcin: There is a lot of talk about Flex GUI test automation. Do you think that everything has already been said on this subject? Do you know something new that Adobe is planning in this area?

Piotr: Flex is evolving really rapidly and I think we can expect a lot more to come either from Adobe or other third-party providers. The upcoming Flash Builder 4 release has built-in wizards and test suite runners for unit testing based on open source FlexUnit project. Of course Flex 4 will also include an automation framework that can be used either with commercial HP QTP or the open source FlexMonkey tools. You can find an interesting article on testing Flex applications with FlexMonkey on Adobe Developer Connection: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flexmonkey.html.

Marcin: Can you tell us how Adobe cares about software quality ? Do you have any new and inventive approaches to the subject?

Piotr: Adobe has very high software quality standards; we could see this recently with the postponed release of Flex 4. We had to make a hard decision to delay it, as it was not passing our QA standards. Unfortunately, since I’m not on the engineering team and I’m not involved in these subjects, I don’t have much to share on this topic.

Marcin: Your blog largely targets Flex developers. Do you have any advice for beginners in this field? What is important, what to watch out for?

Piotr: For Flex beginners I usually suggest following links: