ApacheCon EU 2014

Despite the success of Android and the rise of Tizen and Firefox OS, there seems to be no good open productivity tool on mobiles, inexplicable, given the interest and given the enormous population about to start using mobiles daily, as their default computing device.

But first: Mobiles are not desktops. To exploit the plusses offered we must abandon legacies, such as huge library dependencies, GUI toolkits designed in the 90s, and application architectures whose main effect now is to slow things down and make the mobile user think she is using a bad laptop, at best.

Mobile’s strengths start with the obvious: its mobile. But it also offers a simpler, more direct experience. For the developer at Apache, a mobile productivity tool, such as we have designed with UX Write, can leverage the code and open standards that annul vendor lock-in and obsolescence, while still providing acce

In this talk I give an overview over the Flex project's efforts in optimizing the new Falcon compiler in a way that it is able to not only produce Flash applications, but also Html and JavaScript applications from the same code-base. I will lay special emphasis on how this hybrid approach makes it easy to build Cordova applications while utilizing the full stack of features and tools developers are usually used to: Type-Safe development, Unit-Testing, Integration-Testing. Code Coverage, Debugging an application from within the IDE.

Firefox OS is an open source operating system for mobile phones designed entirely around HTML5, Javascript, CSS and open web standards. Recently Firefox OS has been integrated into Cordova and offers another option for multiplatform mobile developers. By leveraging the inherent advantages of web development and giving developers access to hardware through web standards, we can make an open and affordable mobile web a reality. In this talk Jason Weathersby from Mozilla will show how Firefox OS works, how to build and debug apps for it, and how end users will benefit from this open alternative to other platforms.

We experience a growing number of mobile phones, tablets, phablets, smart TV and similar devices flooding the market almost every day.
Capturing the specification of each device is a tough job. If you want to create a comfortable user experience you need dynamic content according to hardware and browser specifications of your device. That’s the reason why Device Description Repositories (DDR) exist.

Apache DeviceMap is a collaborative effort to create a comprehensive open-source and open-data repository of device information, images and other relevant information for all types of mobile devices, smartphones, tablets, smart TV, etc.. Much of the code was donated from the OpenDDR project, and participants come from many different companies.

The project began in January 2012, later that year OpenDDR contributed DDR APis for Java and. NET. Ongoing steps are a common device repository, a storage structure and maintenance of device data by the Apache community.

Apache Flex is an open source framework for easily building applications for mobile devices, the browser and desktop.

In this talk I'll give a brief history of Apache Flex, cover the main features of Apache Flex including recent releases, it's UI XML markup language, component hierarchy, binding, event bubbling, skinning and other major features of the framework.

I'll show a simple Flex application and how easy it is to make MVC architecture web browser application and convert with few simple modifications from a web browser based application to one that runs on the desktop and in a mobile device.

Finally I look at some of the other more recent directions the project is evolving in with FlaconJX a ActionScript to JavaScript cross compiler, FlexJS a new JavaScript based framework and ant for Air an utility for making cross platform user friendly installers from ant scripts.

FlexUnit has finally cleared Adobe's legal team been donated to the Apache Flex project and made it into it's first release.

In this session I go though how to efficiently unit test an Apache Flex application. I'll start with the basics by showing how to write and run simple Flex Unit tests. Then moving on to how to refactor your code so that it is testable and show several methods to pragmatically test your application. I'll cover a few more advanced topics including asynchronous unit testing, testing event dispatch and UI testing with FlexUnit. Finally for a bit of fun I'll show how FlexUnit can be used in Jenkins and the build status shown via Open Source Hardware Arduino traffic light shield.