Speakers: Cliff Hall

Session

Building Pyramids out of Bits: How can we build software that lasts?

Development platforms and languages shift in and out of vogue like the proverbial sands of time. Every new technology offers some great new features and a lot of variations on old ones. And though it usually means locking ourselves in a technology silo, when it comes time to build, we choose the one that makes the most sense at the time and begin building.

But the cutting edge language tools you use today may be 'so last millennium' tomorrow. And with the spread of Internet connectivity to every conceivable corner of our lives, one platform or technology may not be enough to get the job done today! To reach beyond the browser or desktop and capture a sizable fraction of the fractured mobile market, several completely different languages may need to be used, and new ones adopted as they come into favor.

So, the question developers and project managers should be asking themselves is how can we write software that anticipates its own inevitable migration, and at the same time embrace new technologies along the way to extend our software's use cases?

PureMVC is a design pattern-based framework that was originally written in AS3 for Adobe Flex, Flash and AIR. It has since been ported to a number of other languages/platforms including: AS2/(FlashLite, Flex 1.5), ColdFusion, C#/(.NET, Windows Mobile, SilverLight), haXe/(JavaScript/Neko/Flash), Java(J2ME/EE/SE/FX), PHP and Python(Google App Engine, wxPython). The PureMVC Project Architect will discuss the secrets to PureMVC's portability, and how you can use it to use it to write more 'future-proof' applications.

Bio

Cliff Hall is a Software Architect with over 25 years experience in the industry.

His career has run the gamut from writing games in machine language for Commodore 64 and Apple II to implementation of large scale, object-oriented, enterprise applications.

In 1993, he created Synapse: The Multimedia Journal of the Eclectic – the first CDROM-based digital magazine (or ‘digizine’), which delivered multimedia text, audio, video, animation, and interactive VR through an organic user interface nearly a year before the first web browsers appeared.

Also a musician, he has recorded soundtracks for planetarium shows, performed at a trance festival in the Pureto Rican rainforest, and his current recording project is called Sea of Arrows.

He is owner of Futurescale, Inc., where he architects Rich Internet Applications for major corporations and extremely cool startups worldwide. He is the Project Architect of the open source PureMVC Framework.