eBay Desktop (formerly "Project San Dimas")
One of the bigger projects that I've had the opportunity to take part in was a joint project between Adobe and eBay. Originally intended to be a small proof-of-concept integrating Flash with the eBay shopping experience via the eBay APIs, it has grown and grown and has turned from what was a simple Flex demo app to a large-scale project incorporating many teams. In particular, I have worked with Alan Lewis from eBay (now Project Manager for eBay Desktop) as well as with a very talented team in EffectiveUI. Alan helped with the APIs on the eBay side of things, EffectiveUI worked on, you guessed it, the UI, and I worked diligently on the making those two meet (the fruits of my labor yielded an open-source eBay API written in ActionScript 3).
eBay Desktop is an alternative to the eBay website. It allows users to experience shopping on eBay from a rich and engaging desktop application! Just recently graduating to it's 1.0 release, you can download it at http://desktop.ebay.com.
University Outreach
As a student from UBC, I often hear from companies such as Microsoft or Electronic Arts, that they are working on some new game, developing some killer technology, or hiring new grads or co-ops. Their news hits my ears through many different avenues, either by them posting the information on our student website, coming on campus and hosting an info-session or tech-talk, appearing at our career fairs, or simply putting up posters and flyers around our campus. Adobe, however, at least at UBC, was nowhere to be seen. Shortly after starting at Adobe, I casually mentioned this to my bosses. They, in turn, replied that they would like to change this and have a more interactive role with students. With my experience at UBC and my involvement with the student groups on campus, I have the advantage of seeing what other companies are doing, what methods worked and what methods didn't. They decided to give me the opportunity to take this project and run with it. So I did. I made a proposal for two things...
- the means by which we can achieve our goal
- the new website, TheRabbitHole (I came up with the name :) which I hope to grow into a student developer community
The project proposals were received very well and I'm well on my way to making this a reality!
*Update*
I have just finished the first official "Adobe Tech Talk Tour" and it was a great success! We managed to hit 6 schools across Canada (5 of which I presented at), talked to hundreds of students and even reached some faculty and professors (giving them a slight nidge to get some Adobe software into their curriculum). We've gotten some *very* positive feedback on the whole initiative and I am currently building it up again for next term, this time with even more schools! With my internship nearing an end, I am hoping that this project will grow and spread to more schools in Canada, into the US, and even overseas.
TheRabbitHole.net
As part of my university outreach initiative mentioned above, I am also creating and maintaining a website. This website will hopefully grow into a developer community for students. It is www.therabbithole.net, and it is still in it’s early stages. Sign up and take a look around. Make some noise on the forums or even submit some of your Flex apps to the site. The more the merrier!
Project "Randori" Vertical Demo
A vertical demo in collaboration with co-worker, Zee, to integrate Flex and LiveCycle to create an end-to-end solution featuring the strengths of both products. With Flex providing a rich front-end and LiveCycle to handle a robust back-end and workflow, we are working to simulate a patient registering online with a Flex form to make an appointment to see a doctor. This will replace the traditional paper-based form and manual workflow used in hospitals today. This idea is based off of an ititiative taken by the government to digitize medical records on the United States, as mentioned in ArsTechnica. The project, as well as the fictitious hospital for our demo, is named Randori.
*Update:We’ve actually built the application and demo’d it to some members here at Adobe. In short, we’ve been able to merge the strengths of Flex with those of LiveCycle. With LiveCycle being heavy enterprise software suited for document services and handling, the interface is not very “intuitive”. Given our scenario, we’ve replaced the client-interface with a Flex-interface, making a more intuitive and engaging experience, while still leveraging the document services that the LiveCycle platform provides. The source that I’ve provided is simply for the Flex side of the demo, so feel free to ping me with any questions that you might have.
Randori (source, project outline)
Regular Expressions in PHP
An early project that I had here at Adobe was to help a colleague here build an app for his book. This isn't much of a project but moreso a simple contribution to the community, but I’ll include it here anyways since it has been published to the book site. The short of it all is that Ben Forta, Cold-Fusion Guru, has written a book "Sams Teach Yourself Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes". Included with the book are regular expressions “tester applications” written in various languages such as Javascript, ASP, JSP, and of course ColdFusion. However, an often-requested version was one written in PHP. That’s where I came in. I wrote a quick something with PHP 5 to simulate the actions with the Javascript version. Check them out here, and definitely check out the book, it’s a great resource.
