Volume 1, Issue 3 - June 2008

This Month's Featured Topic: SpringOne 2008 Recap

    

Thank you for making our presence at SpringOne 2008 a success!  Considered the premiere European conference on Spring technologies and SpringSource products, SpringOne was held June 11-12 in Antwerp, Belgium.  SpringOne participants lined up at the Skyway Booth to engage with our Technical Team and learn how Skyway Builder is the only end-to-end modeling tool (Eclipse plugin) for building, testing, and delivering Rich Internet Applications and Web Services for the Spring Framework and Spring MVC.  Booth visitors also had the opportunity to register to win an iTouch and hear about their chance at winning $25,000 in the Skyway Cup. 

In addition to our Skyway Software booth, Jack Kennedy, Co-founder and VP of Product Delivery at Skyway, delivered a presentation at the conference: “Model Centric Design and Development of RIAs for Spring”.  Jack’s talk provided a brief overview of Skyway Visual Perspectives, which were demonstrated as plugins inside the Spring Tools Suite environment. The discussion included a demonstration of a Skyway built web banking application deployed on the SpringSource Application platform, and how that rich AJAX application was built from the data layer to the web UI with Skyway Visual Perspectives without the need to drop into the code.  Jack also discussed how to easily blend coding and modeling, if desired, whether on new projects or existing projects, and described what the generated code and Spring configuration files looked like and how to extend those files.  Look for a video of Jack’s talk to be posted on the Community website soon!

  

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Newsletter Archives
   
COMMUNITY NEWS  
   
Got 5 minutes? Your feedback and participation could be worth $10!

Have you downloaded and installed Skyway Builder CE? Are you a community member who has used our Support materials and documentation? Do you have ideas on how we can improve the Skyway Builder CE product or skywayperspectives.org website? We want to hear about your experiences with Skyway!

We've created a short 9 question survey to solicit your valuable input and feedback on how we are doing. The survey should take no more than 5 minutes of your time, and if you both take the survey AND register as a new community member, you'll receive a $10 digital music gift certificate*. To take advantage of this opportunity:

* One award per entry. Limited to first 250 new members.
 
Skyway Cup 2008 - Extended Submission Date

Great news for our Skyway Community members!  The new targeted release date of Skyway Builder CE RC1 is August 1st, and as a result, we have decided to extend the submission timeframe of the Skyway Cup by one month.  This means that you now have until August 31st to send us your Skyway Cup entries for an opportunity to win $25,000.  The benefits of this new submission deadline are twofold.  First, it will give us more time to receive your feedback and input on the Beta 3 version of Skyway Builder CE (released 5/5/08), ultimately increasing the overall quality of the open source Community Edition product.  Furthermore, the extra weeks will give us the opportunity to publish additional documentation materials that will help you get up to speed on CE faster.  Even with the extended deadline, you may still submit your Skyway Cup entries any time between now and August 31st.
 
Why Join the Skyway Community

The Skyway Community continues to grow and thrive due to the active participation and contribution of our members.  By joining the Skyway Community, you can:

  • Ask and answer questions in the Skyway Forums
  • Report bugs and request new product features in the Skyway Issue Management System (JIRA)
  • Vote on the priority of bug fixes and enhancement requests
  • Receive the monthly Skyway Community Newsletter
  • Receive regular updates about new releases, features and our Skyway Cup developer contest
  • For a limited time, receive a $10 digital music gift certificate
  • And much more...

Register now!
 
Webinar Replay: Model Centric Design and Development for Spring
Skyway and SpringSource hosted a joint webinar on May 28th. This session described the integration of Skyway Software and SpringSource and how developers can use Skyway Builder to modify/customize existing Spring applications quickly and accurately. After a brief architectural review of the Skyway and Spring tools, attendees learned how to access Spring apps in Skyway Builder (using Eclipse), apply Skyway facets/natures, and autowire for Spring to redeploy the app to the same (or new) infrastructure. Check out the webinar replay here.
 
     
DEVELOPMENT NEWS    
     
New Documentation for Building Custom Steps    

New content for building custom steps has been posted to the Skyway Community Portal. Steps are developed using the Eclipse plugin architecture, and the Resources section has a tutorial for building custom steps from scratch.  In the tutorial you are walked through the process of building a new step that does FTP transfers, including creating the plugin project, configuring the plugin wizard, defining the code template using JET, and deploying the new plugin to Skyway Builder.  The wiki also has a lot of reference material for building custom steps.

    
     
Tech Tips - Skyway Steps    
If you have done any development with Skyway Builder, you've realized that the Skyway steps represent a lot of complex functionality which you don't have to write any code for. Steps introduce automation to the application development process. Using steps to implement logic (instead of coding) is very appealing to developers and architects.  First of all, it reduces redundancy of application development.  Rather than continuously having to write the same code over and over with only minor differences, steps automate the generation of code for the developer.  By using steps, there is also more uniformity in the code because all the code was generated in the same consistent manner (using a step template).  There will also be less deviation in code as attributed by different developer styles, conventions or preferences.  Enterprise architects love steps because they are easy to create, and they ensure that developers are accessing enterprise resources in a prescribed and controlled manner.

Steps are added to Skyway Builder thru a plugin architecture.  If you have application logic that can benefit from automation, you can add new custom steps to the Skyway Step palette.  As a matter of fact, all the steps included in Skyway Builder were implemented using the plugin architecture.

    
     
Forums - Stay in touch    
Did you know that the Skyway Forums are RSS enabled?  Each forum and thread has an RSS Feed that you can use to be notified of new posts or replies.  If you want to track all forums, we have also created a single aggregated RSS feed that combines all the individual forum feeds.  In addition to the RSS feeds, a registered Skyway Community member can also subscribe to categories or threads, in which case you will be notified via email when a new post or reply is posted.  This is particularly useful when you want to be immediately notified of a reply to a thread initiated by you.
    
     
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