Jerry Don

Toobler and a couple of its employees have been active promoters of Gods Own Developers, the Kerala Adobe User group since its inception. The group has until now organized many meetings and successfully brought together more than a few developers and designers who share a passion for technology. I have always been proud of my position as the user group co-manager, heading such a group of industrious and passionate people. And I am even more proud now, as the group conducts its first major public event.

The Kerala Adobe users group will be conducting a launch event for Adobe’s latest product and technology releases at Hotel Woods Manor, Cochin on April 10. The products and technologies in focus includes the Flash builder 4, Flex 4, Flash Catalyst and ColdFusion Builder.

I am also proud of the participation of Toobler and its employees in the organiztion of this event. Toobler employees have actively contributed to all aspects of organization of this event from the very beginning. In fact, one of the speakers at the event will be Thazleem Ali, a  ColdFusion expert at Toobler  who will share the stage with Mr.Harish Sivaramakrishnan, Adobe evangelist. Mr.Harish will speak about the Flash Builder 4, Flex4 and the Flash Catalyst while Thazleem will introduce the ColdFusion Builder. The limited seats event is completely free with sessions on all the Adobe’s latest technologies and products. Food and refreshments will be made available to all participants for free. More details of the event are available on http://godsowndevelopers.com/kad/launchevent/

The event will also mark the first time that Cochin is included as a destination in its worldwide promotional tour by Adobe. We believe this is another mark of Cochin’s rising superpower status in the IT world. And we at Toobler are ready for it.

Coldfusion really takes the cake when it comes to generating graphs and charts. The CFchart tag in coldfusion is a simple and efficient way to generate charts. The output is highly customizable. You can check out the article Using Cfchart for charts and graphs in Coldfusion for a brief introduction and to learn the basics of CFchart. Experienced developers may want to look into webcharts, which powers the CFChart tag and allows you to do even more wonderful things.

There are happy endings and there are sad endings… but the best ending is one that is the starting of something even better. That, I hope is what my transition from a full time freelance developer to entrepreneur is all about.

Just over a year ago, I posted on this blog that I was becoming a full time Flex freelancer. I had a few clients from different parts of the world at hand, some interesting projects and good confidence in my skills, which I believed were enough to succeed. But then came the recession. My major client called off his project after 80% of the first phase was completed(I don’t blame him – It was a real estate, local & small business project and even if completed, there couldn’t be a worse time to launch something such). Soon, I found myself working on small MP3 players, maintaining and enhancing applications written by bad, unimaginative programmers with even worse coding styles instead of working on cool and creative applications like I had hoped to.

But luckily for me, I got engaged very soon when a friend and old colleague of mine received a large and really interesting Coldfusion project and invited me to join him. Working on the project, and also a couple of it’s spin-offs, spin-offs, I found myself moving from only Flex development to user interface development, AJAX, XHTML, CSS and later on, PHP and mobile development as well. And I loved it all. We began to get more projects that required different technologies and soon found ourselves in need of persons with better or equal grasp of these technologies. But, most importantly, we wanted persons who shared our passion and love for all technology. Persons who, like the both of us, love and live the technologies of tomorrow so much they can deliver it today.

Soon we had our team. And Toobler was born. I am proud to say that in just over a year, the Toobler team has already successfully developed and delivered more than a few web, desktop and mobile applications using a variety of technologies such as Coldfusion, Flex, AIR, PHP, Android etc. In between, we also launched a company website and even revamped it completely once (www.toobler.com) to reflect our growth.

But still, there’s nothing like first love. Being the hard core fan of the Adobe Flash platform that I am, Flex projects are what excite me the most. And It’s always me who works and manages all the Flex projects. And no matter what, I’m always hungry for some good and creative Flex projects.

Last saturday, I had the good fortune to be a part of the first Kerala Adobe user group meet. It was a small but great one, held in a very informal manner, all credit for which goes to Juwal Bose, the user group admin who oranized the meeting. A report of the meeting has been posted on http://godsowndevelopers.com/kad/blog/2009/12/user-group-meeting-report/