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Even though it was 12 years ago, I vividly remember sitting in a musty conference room with big-name analysts from Gartner. My palms were sweaty and I was almost too terrified to speak. Macromedia had brought me into this meeting to be the customer voice for their new programming platform, Flex. I was an early adopter building a customer portal using this new technology. But I was a coder—not someone who talks publicly. Somehow the Macromedia folks thought I did a good job, and so my life took an interesting turn as I moved from engineering to evangelism.

While sometimes unfortunate it is often necessary to have data silos that share data. The Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) pattern has been around for a long time to address this need and there are tons of solutions out there. If you just need a quick and easy way to copy new & updated records in Salesforce to an external data source, a simple Heroku app and Salesforce Workflow might be the quickest and easiest solution. I’ve put together a sample Node.js application for this: https://github.com/jamesward/salesforce-etl-mysql

The last few weeks my wife and I have been tromping around the Alps (and we climbed Mont Blanc!) Now it’s time to get back to work. This week I’m visiting a few Java User Groups to talk about the usual topics: Adobe AIR and Flex

Here is the schedule:

July 7 - Zurich Java User Group

July 8 - Paris Java User Group

July 9 - Amsterdam NLJUG

The Thinking in Flex keynote which Bruce Eckel, Christoph Rooms, and I did at JavaPolis 2007 has been posted! [Check it out!][3]

Let me know what you think.

BTW: Don’t you love that [Parleys.com][4] is a Flex app?!? And they also have an Adobe AIR version of their app which works pretty well on Linux. (To install the Parleys AIR app on Linux install [Adobe AIR for Linux][5] and then get [the Parleys .air file][6].)

I’ve gone commercial. Kinda. I just bought jamesward.com and it is now my primary domain name instead of jamesward.org. I liked the .org URL but it’s a less familiar URL to non-geeks. You say .com and everyone knows what you mean. The .org will still work - redirects right to here.

So I’m a sell-out. Gone .com. Good news is that you still won’t see any ads on my site.

One of the “problems” with using Flex so much is that I get used to having a simple, predictable layout mechanism. I seem to have forgotten how to do just about anything in HTML. So can someone help me fix the Digg, Reddit, and Share This stuff below? I’ve tried and tried and can’t figure out how to get the dang things to align correctly. Ideally they would align to the bottom of a div or something. Gosh it’s really embarrassing admitting publicly that I can’t do HTML anymore. But since you have already seen how bad this blog looks, you probably already guessed that. :) Oh well. Please help.

Yesterday was an exciting day! Bruce Eckel and I hosted an eSeminar about Flex & Java. We had a few technical difficulties, but overall it was very good. You can watch the recording here:

https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a227210/p16565134/

Bruce and I have a few more eSeminars coming up, find out more info here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

Also yesterday the Open Source Buni Meldware Communication Suite joined the Java.net community. This is a great step forward for the project, which uses Flex for it’s Webmail client. More info from Andy Oliver:

I finally had time to finish my upgrade to WordPress. So hopefully I will be doing more blogging now. In case anyone else needs to migrate from plog to WordPress, you can download the really hacky php script I used. Oh if you received a comment approved email from me for a comment you posted long ago, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize WordPress was going to do that.

-James