On Thursday, June 18th we will launch a new series of webinars called the xfBBQ Webinars, and I’m guessing this may require some explanation. So here goes:

What is xfBBQ?
xfBBQ is a browser-based application, designed and created by Johnson Luong, Synergex Software Developer, (with minor input from Jeff Greene, Harmony Core Technical Lead, and Synergex Principal Engineer) to help us plan for our regular company BBQs. The ones that we are NOT currently enjoying because of the COVID-19 pandemic! Generally though, we host around six BBQs outside our office at lunchtime during the summer season, but most of you won’t care about that because you’re not invited 😉!

Who is Johnson Luong?
Johnson is a valuable member of our development team who, since joining Synergex in 2014, has worked on many different parts of the Synergy/DE toolset. Recently he has played a major role in the creation of our Windows installations using the WiX Toolset, while at the same time having made significant personal contributions to the development of the entire Harmony Core framework.

What does xfBBQ do?
The app allows customers (employees) to register for access, then informs them when BBQs are scheduled, and allows them to select from, and customize, various menu selections for each BBQ. For example, for a given BBQ, I might use the app to express my preference for a “medium rare cheeseburger with hot peppers and a well-done dog.” I could even opt for two burgers, or two dogs, or both … but in doing so I may risk the wrath of Samantha, our wellness coordinator! Johnson assures me she doesn’t have a special “back door” into the data, but I’m not convinced!

Anyhoo, the app collates the orders, presenting the BBQ officials (all who lavish in Synergex VIP status, and rightly so) with the required lists of requirements and ingredients for each BBQ event. Yada, yada, yada.

Why did we do this?
Because having developed an awesome (our words, but we’re confident) web-services framework called Harmony Core, customers were asking for real-world examples of how it might be used. And … we had a real-world problem to solve, namely that we really needed to control the amount of burger patties and sausages that we were purchasing from Costco!

Why xf?
Just for fun! Johnson believes that he has now defined the actual meaning of “xf”, but trust me, he has no clue! Until it’s been ratified by Marketing it means nothing, and that process could take years!

But seriously, this webinar series presents to you an end-to-end view of how a modern browser-based application is developed. You will see how the Harmony Core back-end is built, but you have seen that in previous webinars. What is much more important here is the focus on the development of the front-end application that interacts with the Harmony Core service.

This will be a series of four webinars, as follows:

Thursday June 18 @ 9 am PDT
Creating a Harmony Core solution and hooking it up to a new React app.
Register for part one here.

Thursday June 25 @ 9 am PDT
POSTing data in React, and an introduction to Redux.
Register for part two here.

Wednesday July 1@ 9 am PDT
Captchas, batch processing, and other CRUD.
Register for part three here.

Wednesday July 8@ 9 am PDT
User authentication, styling with Bootstrap, and making a React production build.
Register for part four here.

xfBBQ is a browser-based app. It is a single page application, developed using React and Redux, and using appropriate sprinkles of HTML and JavaScript along the way.

We are completely excited that over the last few months we have built up a marvelous following for our Harmony Core webinars, but I’ll be honest, there won’t be much DBL code to see here! Regardless, I encourage all of you to join us for this webinar series, and to stick with it to the end.

If you’re a DBL dev you may not learn much about your own part of the puzzle that is building a modern distributed application. But I promise you, by the end of the process you will have learned a lot about what it takes to pull together all the other pieces of that puzzle. Building a modern, distributed application requires skills in many different areas, and this webinar series touches on many of them.

It is most important that we get your non-Synergy developers to participate in these webinars. Your web devs will be right at home here, but if you don’t have web devs then invite your Windows devs, your iOS and Android devs, and your MacOS devs.

Web services are accessed via HTTP, and pretty much every development language can do that! The perfect target audience for these webinars is anyone that is involved in developing your next-generation apps. It’s not about any one part of the process, it’s about the entire process, end-to-end, and that will require devs with many different skill sets get together, and to work together to create success!