Yakov Fain: Developer spotlight

What Adobe technologies are you currently using?

I am using Adobe Flex 2.

What is your most recent project you've built using Adobe technologies?

Currently my colleague Anatole Tartakovsky and I work on creating Flex front end and a communication layer for a financial trading company. We added some quality of service information to Flex Data Services (now Adobe LiveCycle Data Services ES) by extending existing FDS classes that support RTMP and AMF protocols. It's a challenging but interesting job and we are pleased with the results.

A publicly available project is a community site www.myflex.org created by our company, Farata Systems. The third-party vendors will be able to sell their commercial Flex components there. This website has been created using Adobe Flex.

What about Adobe technology excites you, inspires you, or makes you say, "Wow that's really cool"?

Adobe Flex excites me because it has been designed in an elegant and smart way that can serve as a solid foundation for our work and allows us to extend its functionality if need be. I don't really like the word "cool," when it comes to describing software, but working with Adobe Flex adds fun to my daily life. But if I have to use the word cool, I'd say that Flash Player itself is the coolest Adobe product that enables lots and lots of third-party software shops transform their cool ideas into solid and profitable business like YouTube.

Where do you get your information about technology?

Most of the information about technology comes from searches on google.com. But I also read lots of technical books. I have lots of them at home, and on weekends I visit Barnes and Noble bookstore, where I sit and read books on various programming languages and technologies.

What are some of your favorite websites or blogs?

My favorite blog is by Joel Spolsky. Joel is a smart man and is the most talented essay writer I know.   

What is your favorite or most useful electronic gadget that you own? How about one that want, but don't own?

In general, I'm not into gadgets. The fact that a phone can also do ten other things does not give me goose bumps—phones are for making calls. But last month I purchased a small GPS navigator from Garmin—it's very useful and is really simple to use. As to the second question, I do not own but want Mercedes s600.

Favorite TV show, movie or band? Why?

TV show: The Sopranos. I live in New York area and these people look very realistic to me even though I'm not a mobster myself. Movie: Pretty Woman. This movie shows that anything is possible, and actors are the best there.

Band: Pink Floyd. Well, because no one does it better.

What's the one thing you'd love to see in Adobe technologies in the future?

I'd like Adobe to create tools that would allow designers to participate in Flex projects as first class citizens. As of today, it's not that easy for people without solid programming experience.

If you could build something you considered revolutionary, what would it be?

As a matter of fact we already did. We've created a business intelligence Web reporting component called ClearBI that delivers reports to the end user with Flash Player. It also  allows them to easily create their own reports and integrates nicely with enterprise Java applications.  The fact the Flex will become open source will allow us to offer this web reporter to AJAX developers as well.